Feasibility of Detecting Brain Areas Involved in Extreme Breath-Hold Diving

Abstract

We report Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal changes recorded in the brain of an elite breath-hold diver during voluntary dry long breath-hold by means of fMRI. An independent component analysis (ICA) method was applied to extract brain areas that are putatively involved in the apnea process network. We discuss the hypothesis that these BOLD signal variations express the functional adaptive diving response under long apnea at rest. This is a preliminary report, which results are promising for large series investigations.