FEET neuroimaging data analysis of dose-dependent effects of ketamine on affective neural circuit
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To examine our second objective to test the dose-dependent effects of ketamine on brain activity in response to emotional expressions, we conducted a one-way repeated Analysis of Variance in SPM—with dose as the within-participant factor—on the activation maps for threat faces (consisting of both anger and fear faces) relative to neutral faces, and happy faces relative to neutral faces. Based on the pre-specified primary focus of anterior insula, amygdala, and ACC neural targets, we constrained our voxel-wise analysis using masks consisting of bilateral anterior insula, amygdala, and ACC. Conducting within-region voxel-wise analyses instead of deriving an average value per region of interest (ROI) enabled us to focus on the ROIs while still obtaining precision in detecting which part within the region is showing an effect. The definition for ROIs of anterior insula, amygdala, and ACC was established in our previous work