Acupuncture is a treasure of the splendid traditional culture of Chinese nations. Famous for its economic, low toxic and side-effect, widely application, remarkable effect, acupuncture has been popularized and promoted, and also has been gradually recognized by the international community. Acupuncture has been included in the human representative list of the intangible cultural heritage. However, its biological mechanism remains unclear. With the advanced development of the modern neuroimaging techniques, the fMRI technique with its non-invasive and higher resolution characteristics has been widely applied in the detection of the brain functions. With this technique, the exploration of the relations among acupoints, brain and viscera has become possible. Previous neuroimaging acupuncture studies have mainly focused on the functional brain cortice induced by acupuncture at certain acupoint, with limit extent about the correlations between these brain regions. Due to the complex multiple system effects underlying the acupuncture, acupuncture action may involve participation of multi-neuro brain networks. Brain network has become a hot issue in recent years. Investigation of the acupuncture effects on the brain network and its neural causal pathways may help reveal the underlying neuropsychological mechanism. This paper, with the brain network underlying acupuncture as the breakthrough point and adopted the whole brain functional connectivity anlaysis and multivariate Granger causality analysis (mGCA) to investigate the acupuncture effects on the brain network and the underlying neural causal pathways. Firstly, we adopted whole brain functional connectivity analysis to construct the whole brain network of healthy subjects modulated by the sustained effects of acupuncture at acupoint ST36 (ACUP) in comparison with acupuncture at nearby non-acupoint (SHAM). Results showed that both ACUP and SHAM could exert heterogeneous modulatory influence to the regulation of the network. We inferred that acupuncture can exert the function-guided neural modulatory mechanisms. Further, we adopted mGCA to evaluate the neural causal pathways during the post-stimulus resting state following acupuncture at the PC6, with the same meridian acupoint PC7 and different meridian acupoint GB37. Result indicated that acupuncture at different acupoints may exert heterogeneous modulatory effects on the causal interactions of brain areas during the post- stimulus resting state. We s...
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