The mouth representation in the human brain studied by sparse sampling-fMRI

Background: Despite the clinical significance of perioral pain syndromes and movement disorders, and the large mouth representation of Penfield's homunculus in the human primary motor-sensory cortex, few functional imaging data are available on the neuroanatomy of oral sensorimotor integration. The present data are derived from neuroimaging studies on language and emotional processing involving mimic muscles. Functional imaging of the perioral region is complicated by movement-related image artefacts. An approach to overcome motion artefacts and task-scanner noise interferences is sparse sampling-fMRI where faci…