Effective predictions of lactate levels and mortality risk can be provided with a few clinical variables when the temporal aspect and variability of patient data are considered.
MRI diffusion-tensor tracking (DTT) was performed in 17 high-functioning adolescents/adults with autism and 17 pairwise-matched controls. White matter pathways involved in face processing were examined due to the relevance of face perception to the social symptoms of autism, and due to known behavioral and functional imaging findings in autism. The hippocampo-fusiform (HF) and amygdalo-fusiform (AF) pathways had normal size and shape but abnormal microstructure in the autism group. The right HF had reduced across-fiber diffusivity (D-min) compared with controls, opposite to the whole-brain effect of increased D-min. In contrast, left HF, right AF, and left AF had increased D-min and increased along-fiber diffusivity (D-max), more consistent with the whole-brain effect. There was a general loss of lateralization compared with controls. The right HF D-min was markedly low in the autism subgroup with lower Benton face recognition scores, compared with the lower-Benton control subgroup, and compared with the higher-Benton autism subgroup. Similar behavioral relationships were found for performance IQ. Such results suggest an early functionally-significant pathological process in right HF consistent with small-diameter axons (with correspondingly slower neural transmission) and/or higher packing density. In left AF and HF, changes were interpreted as secondary, possibly reflecting axonal loss and/or decreased myelination.
Purpose:To use MRI diffusion-tensor tracking (DTT) to test for the presence of unknown neuronal fiber pathways interconnecting the mid-fusiform cortex and anteromedial temporal lobe in humans. Such pathways are hypothesized to exist because these regions coactivate in functional MRI (fMRI) studies of emotion-valued faces and words, suggesting a functional link that could be mediated by neuronal connections. Materials and Methods:A total of 15 normal human subjects were studied using unbiased DTT approaches designed for probing unknown pathways, including wholebrain seeding and large pathway-selection volumes. Several quality-control steps verified the results.Results: Parallel amygdalo-fusiform and hippocampo-fusiform pathways were found in all subjects. The pathways begin/end at the mid-fusiform gyrus above the lateral occipitotemporal sulcus bilaterally. The superior pathway ends/ begins at the superolateral amygdala. The inferior pathway crosses medially and ends/begins at the hippocampal head. The pathways are left-lateralized, with consistently larger cross-sectional area, higher anisotropy, and lower minimum eigenvalue (D-min) on the left, where D-min assesses intrinsic cross-fiber diffusivity independent of curvature. Conclusion:A previously-undescribed pathway system interconnecting the mid-fusiform region with the amygdala/ hippocampus has been revealed. This pathway system may be important for recognition, memory consolidation, and emotional modulation of face, object, and lexical information, which may be disrupted in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. THE HUMAN BRAIN contains specific structural regions that support functions such as language, social cognition, memory, and abstract reasoning. These structures are likely unique or greatly expanded relative to the nonhuman primate brain. The anatomical connections involved in these functions are largely unknown in humans, as such connections cannot be directly inferred from invasive tracer studies of nonhuman primates (1,2). Diffusion tensor tracking (DTT) provides a direct measurement of white matter pathway anatomy and connectivity that previously was not possible. First introduced in fixed rat brain (3) and living humans (4), DTT was subsequently applied to reconstruct several dominant macroscopic pathways in the human brain (5-9). Extension of DTT to discover previously unknown pathways requires specific techniques and unbiased approaches.Here we use DTT to test the hypothesis that a pathway system exists in humans interconnecting the midfusiform region (MFR) with the amygdala/hippocampus. The mid-fusiform region incorporates a complex high-order cortex associated with visual object recognition, including special "objects" such as faces (in both hemispheres, more so on the right), non-face objects (in both hemispheres, more so on the left), and aspects of visual-lexical function (in the left hemisphere) (10 -20). We hypothesize the existence of these pathways based on available human functional and pathological data. In several functional MRI ...
The UFLK method can extract features from digitized paintings. We were able to extract characteristics of art without any prior information about the nature of the features or the stylistic designation of the paintings. The methods herein may provide art researchers with the latest computational techniques for the documentation, interpretation, and forensics of art. The tools could assist the preservation of culturally sensitive works of art for future generations, and provide new insights into works of art and the artists who created them.
Resting state functional connectivity studies in fMRI have been used to demonstrate that the human brain is organized into inherent functional networks in the absence of stimuli. The basis for this activity is based on the spontaneous fluctuations observed during rest. In the present study, the time series generated from these fluctuations were characterized as either being linear or nonlinear based on the Delay Vector Variance method, applied through an examination of the local predictability of the signal. It was found that the default mode resting state network is composed of relatively more linear signals compared to the visual, task positive visuospatial, motor, and auditory resting state network time series. Also, it was shown that the visual cortex resting state network is more nonlinear relative to these aforementioned networks. Furthermore, using a histogram map of the nonlinearly characterized voxels for all the subjects, the histogram map was able to retrieve the peak intensity in four out of six resting state networks. Thus, the findings may provide the basis for a novel way to explore spontaneous fluctuations in the resting state brain.
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