Harold Mouras of The Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris has authored some methodological insight into means of measuring correlation between neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI and PET and penile response. Some gems from the abstract…
In this paper, some of the main methodological aspects of these studies will be summarized, including the participants, the way to induce sexual arousal within the scanner and the different types of analyses performed.
We then focus on recent studies that concurrently measured cerebral and penile responses by plethysmography. Some cerebral areas where significant correlations were found between the hemodynamic cerebral and the plethysmographic signals are presented. Finally, as the use of different penile plethysmographic methods were referred to in the literature, we consider the prospects of their use for the study of the neural correlates of human male SA.
One can see how it was difficult to find an appropriate picture to accompany this post. Unfortunately, even the mighty Universty of California library system (to which some of us still have access) doesn’t have e-access to Current Medical Imaging Reviews, so we’ll just link you to the abstract.