Use of functional MRI to evaluate correlation between acupoints and brain cortex activities: Comparison between conventional and electrical acupuncture

The use of acupuncture therapy in various functional disorders goes back several thousand years in China. Recently, acupuncture becomes a 'hot' topic in the functional Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging research studies [1-4]. A majority of these research projects is to study the correlation between the acupuncture points (acupoints) and the corresponding brain cortices, either by conventional acupuncture, electro-acupuncture or laser acupuncture. Cho et al reported that by stimulating the vision-related acupoints (BL60, BL65, BL66, BL67) at the lateral side of the foot, neural response (i.e. high signal) was obtained at the visual cortex Ell. In this study, we verified Cho et al acupoints using conventional acupuncture and electro-acupuncture.