An investigation of cortical representation of pain and temperature by means of dual regression technique.

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Simultaneous activation within a very wide array of subcortical and cortical brain structures elicited by nociceptive stimuli, called "Pain Matrix" has been conceptualized since last few decades. Those multi-regional activation have made understanding difficult due to lack of appropriate method to extract spatio-temporal information from each respective region of interest.An exploratory analysis technique, dual regression, allows to back-reconstruct each group-level component for each of scans at the individual participant-level. It could be a solution for better understanding of cortical representation of pain and temperature.We introduced a modified dual regression technique into our studies on thermosensory and aversive conditioning of pain, and in which we successfully obtained new findings such as the susceptiblity to experience dependent learning on human thermosensory discrimination. Fruitful experiences and paths to the future studies have been provided through the studies.