Monitoring Acupuncture Effects on Human Brain by fMRIKathleen K. S. Hui 1, Vitaly Napadow 1, Jing Liu 1, Ming Li 1, Ovidiu Marina 1,2, Erika E. Nixon 1, Joshua D. Claunch 1, Lauren LaCount 1, Tara Sporko 1, Kenneth K. Kwong 1
1Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 2William Beaumont Hospital
FMRI and physiological monitoring is used to study the effects of Acupuncture on the central and peripheral nervous systems. Acupuncture mobilizes a limbic-paralimbic-neocortical network, with great overlap with the default mode network, to modulate neurological activity, possibly related to its autonomic effect in the peripheral nervous system.