Several functional imaging studies have shown that the extent of activation and percentage change in cerebral blood flow in the supplementary motor area (SMA) during a bimanual mirror performance of a simple repetitive movement are almost identical to those during a unimanual movement. The aim of this study was to investigate whether this finding was also applicable to a more complex movement. Eight right-handed, healthy volunteers performed unimanually (with their right and left hands) and bimanually (in a mirror fashion) thumb-finger opposition in a nonconsecutive order (index-middle-index-ring-index-little-index-middle ... fingers). The SMA proper was more activated during the bimanual movement than the unimanual movement with either hand. This is in accordance with the hypothesis that bimanual movement, even in a mirror fashion, is more difficult than unimanual movement when the task is complex but not when the task is simple. Pre-SMA was inconsistently activated. The results suggest that the SMA proper plays an active role in executive processing during bimanual mirror performance of complex movements.
The use of a diffuse-projection fiber system which intermittently transmits a reduced intensity laser beam is an effective tool to regulate temperature during LITT using MR temperature measurement.
Magnetic resonance cisternography appears to show great promise for evaluation of patients with neurovascular compression or tumors in and around the basal cisterns; the procedure adds only a small amount of imaging time.
Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) theoretically aims to detect random motion over small distances, such as Brownian motion. Therefore, breath-hold scanning has been considered the only way to acquire DWI in the body without artifacts from bulk motion. Recent reports suggest that non-breath-hold scanning is feasible. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of respiratory motion on DWI using a moving phantom model. Our results showed that the difference in apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) was less than 10% between a static phantom and a moving phantom. There was no relation between the speed and stroke of the moving phantom and the calculated ADC. The results indicate that stable motion such as calm respiration does not cause signal loss on DWI, in contrast to intra-voxel incoherent motion (IVIM). The images obtained using this method showed high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), suitable for three-dimensional display of the lesion.
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