Research Of Sustained Effects Of Acupuncture Based On Function-Guide Action

Acupuncture, as a valuable traditional culture of the Chinese nation and like a gem in Chinese traditional culture, stems from long-term experiences in fighting against diseases. And acupuncture provides great contribution to human health and civilizations of the world. However, the Traditional Chinese Medicine, processed by Chinese classical philosophy, makes acupuncture hard to reconcile with modern medicines and it obstructs the development of acupuncture theories. With the development of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), fMRI has provided us with more direct information about the neural basis of the human brain with its non-invasive, non-radiative and higher resolution advantages. fMRI is known as a "window" to observe advanced functions of brain. Due to the presentation of fMRI, it is possible to build up relationships among acupoints, brain and organs.In the present researches of acupuncture, we used fMRI technology to indicate the deep relationships between the sustained effects of different acupoints and one of the most important brain networks---the default mode network (DMN), combining the theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine and modern medical standpoints. By accessing to relevant documents and related experiment studies, it is seen that the ON-OFF design is not fit for acupuncture studies. If we use block paradigms to investigate acupuncture, the influence of the time variability of acupuncture may influence the estimated results. Therefore, a non-repeated event-related (NRER) fMRI design was adopted to complete the whole researches in this thesis. The details of researches and the main innovations are listed as follows:Firstly, a data driven method named independent component analysis (ICA) was applied tofind whether the modulations of acupuncture effects to the DMN were observed at the threeacupoints (GB37, BL60 and KI8) and whether the modulation patterns were distinct induced by the specificity of different acupoint. The results indicated that the three acupoints stimulations could modulate the DMN. Moreover, the modulation patterns were different from the spatial dimension.Secondly, based on the study mentioned above, we further investigated how to change the intrinsic connectivity in the DMN by sustained acupuncture effects of different acupoints (GB37, BL60, KI8 and a sham). Partial correlation approach was adopted to evaluate the interregional interactions associated with the DMN before and after acupuncture stimulation at different acupoints. Moreover, the suggestion was provided that distinct modulation patterns to the DMN were related to functional specificity of acupoints.Thirdly, another study carried out to explore function-guide action of acupuncture bycombining spatial and temporal information. The discrete cosine basis set (DCT) andfunctional connectivity (FC) methods were adopted to detect the differences between GB37and KI8. The results predicted that acupuncture-related effects appearing during the post-stimulation state induced such resource redistributions and provided neuroimaging data to investigate the relationships between the specificity of acupuncture treatments and certain disorders.Finally, the hybrid conventional general linear model (GLM) and ICA method was provided to explore both manipulatoin-related effects and the sustained effects of acupuncture. Furthermore, the approach was used to the neural specificity of acupuncture stimulation at ST36. This study provided a new data-processing idea for acupuncture researches.In summary, this thesis focuses on the specificity of acupoints. And the combining spatial-temporal information methods and the function-guide action theory were produced, related to acupuncture. It is hoped that the researches presented in this thesis can accelerate the delevopment of the mechanism underlying acupuncture basing on fMRI.