fMRI Meets Virtual Reality: A New Step Towards a Better Understanding of our Brain

➣ By Giuseppe Riva

The significant progress of VR technology is demonstrated by the increased availability of professional (e.g. Unity3d) and free (e.g. NeuroVR) VR-development kits that can be used to develop research oriented virtual environments. Specifically, these kits enable researchers to create virtual environments in which participants can interact/navigate and simultaneously to assess physiological indexes and brain functioning.

In particular, the combination of VR and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is of great general interest for clinical as well as for neuroscience researchers. First, fMRI represents a crucial method for clinical researchers to evaluate VR’s capability to simulate reality and to validate its therapeutic and diagnostic value. For example, the added value of VR therapy in the field of acute pain and motor rehabilitation was strongly supported by fMRI studies.

Moreover, neuroscientists can use VR to create more realistic stimuli for fMRI experiments: VR makes it possible to overcome one of its main limitations: the passive role of the assessed subject. The main advantage of VR lies in the presentation and interaction with realistic stimuli. Instead of just watching a movie, subjects can interact actively with VR, for example, navigating and exploring the presented environment. This possibility has been exploited by different VR studies investigating the role of the hippocampus and the parahippocampal area in topographical, spatial and episodic memory processes. In addition, VR has been used to investigate the location of so-called place cells in the human brain.

A recent area of research is the use of VR to track the development of spatial and mnemonic representations in realistic settings simultaneously. To reach this goal, the interaction with VR has been analyzed using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) methods and fMRI adaptation/repetition suppression. The available data suggests that realistic VR scenarios in combination with novel multivariate analysis tools could potentially reveal new insights into the organizational structure of mnemonic networks.

These studies suggest that there is much scope for disseminating this approach to clinicians and neuroscientists in order to promote this field of research. Unfortunately, combining VR and fMRI is not a trivial task, as common fMRI software tools do not offer VR support and MRI scanners prohibit head movement.

However, in the last five years different companies have started to offer robust fMRI compatible stimulus presentation VR equipment (e.g. fMRI compatible head mounted displays). These tools together with the increase in computing and graphical power ensure that the marriage between VR and fMRI will allow a significant headway in better understanding our brain functioning.

Giuseppe Riva, Ph.D.                                                                                                   Istituto Auxlogico Italiano                                                                                                   giuseppe.riva@unicatt.it                                                       auxo.psylab@auxologico.it