Tablet Technology for Writing and Drawing during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review
1
Department of Medical Biophysics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5G 1L7, Canada
2
Physical Sciences, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Toronto, ON M4N 3M5, Canada
3
Keenan Research Centre for Biomedical Science, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1T8, Canada
4
Division of Neurosurgery, St. Michael’s Hospital, Toronto, ON M5B 1W8, Canada
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2021, 21(2), 401; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020401
Received: 19 November 2020
/
Revised: 31 December 2020
/
Accepted: 4 January 2021
/
Published: 8 January 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors for Biomedical Imaging)
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a powerful modality to study brain activity. To approximate naturalistic writing and drawing behaviours inside the scanner, many fMRI-compatible tablet technologies have been developed. The digitizing feature of the tablets also allows examination of behavioural kinematics with greater detail than using paper. With enhanced ecological validity, tablet devices have advanced the fields of neuropsychological tests, neurosurgery, and neurolinguistics. Specifically, tablet devices have been used to adopt many traditional paper-based writing and drawing neuropsychological tests for fMRI. In functional neurosurgery, tablet technologies have enabled intra-operative brain mapping during awake craniotomy in brain tumour patients, as well as quantitative tremor assessment for treatment outcome monitoring. Tablet devices also play an important role in identifying the neural correlates of writing in the healthy and diseased brain. The fMRI-compatible tablets provide an excellent platform to support naturalistic motor responses and examine detailed behavioural kinematics.
View Full-Text
Keywords:
fMRI; fMRI compatibility; fMRI equipment; computerized tablet; neuropsychological tests; functional neurosurgery; essential tremor; writing; drawing; kinematics
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Lin, Z.; Tam, F.; Churchill, N.W.; Schweizer, T.A.; Graham, S.J. Tablet Technology for Writing and Drawing during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review. Sensors 2021, 21, 401. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020401
AMA Style
Lin Z, Tam F, Churchill NW, Schweizer TA, Graham SJ. Tablet Technology for Writing and Drawing during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review. Sensors. 2021; 21(2):401. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020401
Chicago/Turabian StyleLin, Zhongmin, Fred Tam, Nathan W. Churchill, Tom A. Schweizer, and Simon J. Graham. 2021. "Tablet Technology for Writing and Drawing during Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review" Sensors 21, no. 2: 401. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020401
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
