Figure 1.
One participant wearing the thermal suit before the entrance into the environmental chamber (a) and before fMRI scanning (b).
The double-layer suit, including pants, shirts and hat, was made of flexible fabric with a series of embedded pipelines. During the fMRI scan, the pipelines were connected to the subsidiary temperature control device, which can regulate the temperature of the water circulating in the pipelines. Also, a respiration hood was connected to an air container and air temperature controller. The air was heated to the preset temperature before it was exported to the respiration hood.
Figure 2.
Maps of brain regions showing significant positive or negative correlations with the PCC/PCu in a voxel-wise manner of within-group analysis.
(a) NC group, (b) HT group and between-group analysis (c).
Table 1.
Areas with significantly altered functional connectivities with the PCC/PCu between the HT and NC groups.
Figure 3.
Results of functional connectivity analysis throughout the entire brain.
(a–b) Mean zFC matrices of both groups throughout the entire brain divided into 90 regions by the AAL atlas. Visually different correlations between both groups mainly focused on the prefrontal regions (red rectangle) and temporal regions (yellow rectangle). (c–d) Significant correlations throughout the whole brain between both groups are depicted in the matrix figure (c) and brain network figure (d). The top-left triangle in Fig. 3 (c) exhibits the p value of the significant correlations and the bottom-right one exhibits the T value of the corresponding correlations. The rectangles in green, pink, blue and black represent significant altered correlations. Details can be seen in the Result part.
Figure 4.
Results of correlation analysis of functional connectivity changes with behavioral performance and physiological changes.
(a) Scatter plots of the number of significantly altered functional connectivities () and the increase of executive control reaction time (
).Significant positive correlations were found between
and
. (b–c) Scatter plots of the number of significantly altered functional connectivities (
) and the differential rectal temperature (b), weight loss (c), but no significant correlations were found.