As the treasure of the splendid traditional culture of Chinese nations, acupuncture possesses massive health resources with unique characters and advantages in Chinese medical and health care undertakings. For the past few years, due to its simpleness, convenience, low expense and efficiency, acupuncture has been more and more popularized and gradually gained appreciations from the international community. However, the traditional Chinese Medicine of acupuncture theories, essentially growing out of practices and deeply processed by Chinese classical philosophy, makes it hard to reconcile with modern medicines in many aspects, which sets up shackles for the modernization of ancient wisdom. With the rapid development of noninvasive brain imaging techniques, abundant results have been presented on the correlation between acupuncture at certain acupoint and the functional brain cortices, which is also referred as acupoint specificity. Since neuroimaging research on acupuncture is still in the embryonic stage, no generalized methodologies or patterns have been proposed. As a result, scientific representation on acupoint specificity remains debatable in contemporary biomedical information, hindering acupuncture’s profound significance in modern medical practice. For one thing, a large proportion of neuroimaging acupuncture researches have been carried out with the utilization of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Indeed, fMRI’s high spatial resolution (on the order of millimeters scale) has prominently paved the way to identify the induced activity of brain regions in the spatial dimension reliably. However, the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent signal detected by fMRI only reflects the neuronal activity indirectly. Due to the latency of the hemodynamic response, it is more or less handicapped in the temporal dimension, only examining correlations in the relatively slow neuronal oscillations. For another, previous acupuncture studies have mainly focused on the functional brain cortcie’s spatial response to the acupuncture at certain acupoint, with limit extent about the correlations between these brain regions. Due to the complex multiple system effects underlying acupuncture, multi-neuro brain networks may be involved in the acupuncture exertion. Therefore, only exploring the spatial responses of discrete brain regions and ignoring their interactions induced by acupuncture may not be sufficient to unveil the specific neuropsychological mechanism un...
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