FUNCTIONAL MRI IN AWAKE DOGS PREDICTS SUITABILITY FOR ASSISTANCE WORK

The overall goal of this work was to measure the efficacy of fMRI for predicting whether a dog would be a successful service dog. The training and imaging were performed in 50 dogs entering advanced training at 17-21 months of age. FMRI responses were measured while each dog observed hand signals indicating either reward or no reward and given by both a familiar handler and a stranger. 49 dogs successfully completed fMRI training and scanning. Of these, 33 eventually completed service training and were matched with a person, while 10 were released for behavioral reasons. Using anatomically defined regions-of-interest in the ventral caudate, amygdala, and visual cortex, we developed a classifier based on the dogs' outcomes. We found that responses in the stranger condition were sufficient to develop an accurate brain-based classifier. On all data, the classifier had a positive predictive value of 96% with 10% false positives. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.90 (0.79 with 4-fold cross-validation, P=0.02), indicating a significant diagnostic capability. Within the stranger condition, the differential response to [reward - no reward] in ventral caudate was positively correlated with a successful outcome, while the differential response in the amygdala was negatively correlated to outcome. These results show that successful service dogs transfer knowledge to strangers as indexed by ventral caudate activity without excessive arousal as measured in the amygdala.