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since the field of canine neuroimaging is very young and small (but constantly growing!), I decided to create a short intro thread
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there are currently 5 labs worldwide conducting MRI studies with fully awake & unrestrained dogs, 2 of them are in Europe 
, 2 in 
and 1 in 
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, 2 in and 1 in 2/n
crucially, the dogs are not at all restrained or in any way sedated. we spend many hours, months, and years training them making sure they habituate to the scanner environment & sounds + they wear a headwrap to make sure the earplugs stay in place 3/n see: https://bit.ly/3nQnWoq
typically, data collection is split in short runs between 3-5 minutes across multiple days to make sure the dogs stay attentive, as motionless as possible and enjoy taking part. the number of runs within one session depends on the dog’s motivation but is max. 1 hour/day. 4/n
the coils used to scan the dogs differ between labs. we, for example, used a knee coil, others flex or birdcage coils designed for humans, but my lab switched to a custom-made coil a few months ago - stay tuned for updates & pictures
). 5/n
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a big difference between dog and human brains are muscles. this makes automated skull-stripping close to impossible and consequently normalization. that’s why I create individual binary brain masks to skullstrip the dog brains. for more: https://bit.ly/2LNintD 6/n
why is it interesting to perform comparative studies with dogs and humans? dogs are not close ancestors but close companions of humans since thousands of years. this makes them an excellent model species to study the potentially convergent evolution of socio-cognitive skills. 7/n
to date, there are about 30 published dog fMRI studies out there and I’ll try to give a bit of an overview in another thread next week
and here is some further evidence that I am also a goat person. 8/8
and here is some further evidence that I am also a goat person. 8/8
