Acute effects of efferent and afferent vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on neural activity accessed with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) in rats

Study Purpose: This study aims to evaluate the effects of efferent/afferent vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on neural activity in rats.

Data Collection: Briefly, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was performed to access the whole brain neural activity. Vagotomy was performed on the afferent/efferent side of the cuff electrode. The stimulation was delivered during the imaging acquisition. This imaging session was repeated multiple times for each animal to achieve better results. For each rat, fMRI data was stored in NIfTI files, and the stimulation information was stored in mat files.

Primary Conclusion: none stated

Curator's Notes

Experimental Design: Four experiments were performed in this study. In the first study, researchers tested the brain response to low dose GES (current=0.6mA, pulse width=0.2ms, frequency=5Hz) which followed a 20s-ON-40s-OFF stimulation pattern. In the second study, researchers switched to high dose GES (current=6mA, pulse width=0.3ms, frequency=20Hz) which followed a 2s-ON-3s-OFF stimulation pattern. In the third and fourth study, they performed bilateral cervical vagotomy for each animal and repeated the simulation described in the first and second study respectively. Experimental animals were divided into two experimental groups: the Control group that did not receive any stimulation and the VNS group that was subjected to vagus nerve stimulation.

Completeness: This is a part of a larger dataset:

Subjects & Samples: This study used adult Sprague-Dawley male rats (n=16) between 6-20 weeks old.

Primary vs derivative data: Primary data contains data recording of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for each animal, the fMRI data was stored in NIfTI files, and the stimulation information was stored in mat files. The size of the primary data is approximately 13 GB and is organized by the subject ID. Derivative data consisits of preprocessed fMRI data.

Important Notes: Every animal may experience different stimulation parameters. The information of the selected stimulation parameter can be found in the spreadsheet in each subject folder