Principal Investigator: Ioannis G. Koutlas, U of MN, School of Dentistry

Co-Principal Investigators: Arthur Leuthold, BSC; Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, BSC
Post-Doctoral Associate: Elissaios Karageorgiou, BSC
Graduate Assistant: Aurelio A. Alonso, U of MN; BSC

The Study:     
     There are many patients who complain of facial pain (neuralgia) and altered facial sensation.  The implication of the human central nervous system (CNS) in such conditions is not well understood. Most of our knowledge in the participation of the CNS derives from extrapolations from animal model studies. The use of novel neuroimaging techniques such as MEG opens the door to appreciate and study brain mechanisms of altered facial somesthesia at high temporal resolution which is not provided by other methods such as fMRI and PET.  However, in order to proceed with such a study, it is imperative to first identify the patterns of neural signal processing in healthy individuals when their face is stimulated.

     Research will collect images and data from healthy volunteers and patients with altered facial somesthesia as they undergo stimulation of various areas of their faces.  In the initial steps of this project researchers will be focusing on the following questions:

• What is the crucial difference in brain mechanisms between perceiving some facial stimuli but not others, all of the same magnitude (detection threshold)?
• What are the neural mechanisms that encode the magnitude of facial tactile stimulation, i.e. changes in stimulus intensity?
• What are the mechanisms that elicit different percepts, i.e. perception of discrete stimulation versus illusion of motion?

     Several data analyses will hopefully provide necessary information that will enable researchers to pinpoint similarities and differences between altered states of facial sensation such as pain. Also, researchers hope that the MEG will become an invaluable tool to detect neural network alterations and categorize patients with different types of facial neuralgias.

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