Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
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MRI appearance of subthalamic nucleus (STN) boundaries in Parkinson's patients is often unreliable and not well understood. An objective comparison between FSE T2 and inversion recovery (FSTIR) sequences for stereotactic placement of deep brain stimulators is presented to advance current understanding of STN tissue contrast for refractory Parkinson's disease (PD). ⋯ STN, a common stimulation target, shows an age dependent trend for normalized FSTIR MRI contrast. Although larger patient pools are needed, our work points to tissue relaxation-based changes in STN that may provide insight in early stages of brain pathology involving DBS targets in medically refractory Parkinson's disease.
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We investigated the impact of focal and diffuse corticospinal tracts damage on sensory-motor disability in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. ⋯ DTI at 3T shows that the impact of diffuse corticospinal tracts disease on sensory-motor disability is greatly mediated by focal lesions in MS.
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The Circle of Willis (COW) is the main collateral system between the bilateral carotid systems and the posterior circulation. COW normal variants are encountered in up to 62% of subjects. We hypothesize that, in patients with carotid artery stenosis, the presence of COW variants is a risk factor for leukoaraiosis. ⋯ The presence and the number of COW variants are associated with a higher leukoaraiosis volume in patients with significant internal carotid artery stenosis.
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We tested the validity of a freely available segmentation pipeline to measure compartmental brain volumes from 3T MRI in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Our primary focus was methodological to explore the effect of segmentation corrections on the clinical relevance of the output metrics. ⋯ We report the validity of a segmentation pipeline for the detection of MS-related brain atrophy with 3T MRI. Longitudinal studies are warranted to extend these results.
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We presented MRI and DWI findings of a 12-year-old boy with primary carnitine deficiency, manifested with hypoglycemic hypoketotic encephalopathy. ⋯ MRI and DWI are helpful in the diagnosis, therapy planning and follow up of encephalopathic cases with carnitine deficiency.