Hub of functional network changes from real-time fMRI neurofeedback on heavy smokers

Real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI) neurofeedback (NF) has widely been adopted to regulate the neuronal activity (NA) within regions-of-interest. Despite the fact that functional connectivity (FC) changes via rtfMRI-NF, there was no study to explicitly provide the FC patterns as NF signals. Therefore, both NA and FC patterns were adopted as feedback signal to investigate a potential utility of the FC-enabled rtfMRI-NF. To compare two different conditions (i.e., traditional rtfMRI-NF based on only NA and proposed rtfMRI-NF considering both NA and FC) from fourteen heavy smokers, the FC via pair-wise correlation from group ICA was compared between two NF conditions fixing a stimulus. The components including precuneus were shown significant difference (p <; 10^-3) between NF conditions, commonly estimated across 12 different stimuli. This result would indicate that the hub of functional network changes depending on NF types for smoking addiction is localized into a part of precuneus.