Transdural doppler ultrasonography monitors cerebral blood flow changes in relation to motor tasks

Monitoring changes in cerebral blood flow in association with neuronal activity has widely been used to evaluate various brain functions. However, current techniques do not directly measure blood flow changes in specified blood vessels. The present study identified arterioles within the cerebral cortex by echoencephalography and color Doppler imaging, and then measured blood flow velocity (BFV) changes in pulsed-wave Doppler mode. We applied this "transdural Doppler ultrasonography (TDD)" to examine BFV changes in the cortical motor-related areas of monkeys during the performance of unimanual (right or left) and bimanual key-press tasks. BFV in the primary motor cortex (MI) was increased in response to contralateral movement. In each of the unimanual and bimanual tasks, bimodal BFV increases related to both the instruction signal and the movement were observed in the supplementary motor area (SMA). Such BFV changes in the SMA were prominent during the early stage of task training and gradually decreased with improvements in task performance, leaving those in the MI unchanged. Moreover, BFV changes in the SMA depended on task difficulty. The present results indicate that TDD is useful for evaluating regional brain functions.