Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
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Controlled Clinical Trial
The location of pretreatment hyperdense middle cerebral artery sign predicts the outcome of intraarterial thrombectomy for acute stroke.
Intraarterial (IA) mechanical thrombectomy has an excellent recanalization rate but does not always correlate with good clinical outcomes. We aimed to investigate whether hyperdense middle cerebral artery sign (HMCAS) on preintervention nonenhanced CT (NECT) predicts IA therapy outcome for acute stroke. ⋯ For acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusion, the lack of HMCAS on NECT does not predict favorable outcome after IA therapy. Among those with HMCAS, proximal and longer HMCAS predicts unfavorable outcome.
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Amygdala enlargement (AE) has been reported as an epileptogenic focus in subtypes of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical, morphological, and pathological characteristics of AE. ⋯ Cortical dysplasia may be one of the pathological diagnoses in AE, and in some patients it may extend to the temporal pole.
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Intensity variation between magnetic resonance images (MRI) hinders comparison of tissue intensity distributions in multicenter MRI studies of brain diseases. The available intensity normalization techniques generally work well in healthy subjects but not in the presence of pathologies that affect tissue intensity. One such disease is multiple sclerosis (MS), which is associated with lesions that prominently affect white matter (WM). ⋯ We developed a WM-independent T1w MRI normalization method and tested its performance. This method is suitable for longitudinal multicenter clinical studies for the assessment of the recovery or progression of disease affecting WM.
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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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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.