Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
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Neurosurgical resection is one of the few opportunities researchers have to image the human brain pre- and postfocal damage. A major challenge associated with brains undergoing surgical resection is that they often do not fit brain templates most image-processing methodologies are based on. Manual intervention is required to reconcile the pathology, requiring time investment and introducing reproducibility concerns, and extreme cases must be excluded. ⋯ Mapping a system as variable and complex as the human brain requires sample sizes much larger than the current technology can support. This pipeline can be used to execute large-scale, sufficiently powered analyses by meeting the need for an automatic approach to objectively quantify white matter disconnection.
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Ischemic stroke can occur in 20-55% of patients with infective endocarditis (IE) with 75% occurring during the first 2 weeks of treatment. CT or MRI brain can diagnose the sequelae of stroke but transcranial Doppler (TCD) can document active embolization. We undertook a retrospective review of our patient cohort and a systematic review of literature to assess the role of TCD in early diagnosis and management of ischemic stroke in IE. ⋯ Presence of embolization in the form of high-intensity transient signals (HITS) detected on TCDs can be used for early diagnosis of IE, assessing efficacy of antibiotic therapy, and stratification of stroke risk in IE. This can aid further research into testing preventative interventions for reducing stroke burden in IE such as earlier valvular surgery or vacuum-assisted vegetation extraction.
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Imaging-based selection of stroke patients for endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) remains an ongoing challenge. Our aim was to determine the value of a combined parameter of ischemic core volume (ICV) and the relative degree of cerebral blood flow in the penumbra for morphologic and clinical outcome prediction. ⋯ In EVT-treated stroke patients, pw-ICV outperforms the more commonly used ICV in the prediction of morphological and functional outcome.
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The process of myelination starts in utero around 20 weeks of gestation and continues through adulthood. We first set out to characterize the maturation of the tract-specific myelin content in healthy subjects from childhood (7-12 years) into adulthood (18-32 years). Second, we apply the resulting development graph to children with childhood absence epilepsy (CAE), a pediatric epilepsy that was previously characterized by changes in myelin content. ⋯ These results indicate that CAE is associated with widespread neurodevelopmental myelin differences.
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Cerebral blood flow (CBF) has been reported to increase after shunt surgery in patients with idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH). The aims of this study were to investigate if CBF, measured using the noninvasive perfusion MRI method arterial spin labeling (ASL), increased after shunt surgery, if postoperative change in CBF correlated with improvement in symptoms, and if baseline CBF data correlated with postoperative outcome. ⋯ The clinical value of ASL in the work-up of patients with iNPH is uncertain. In this study, ASL could not predict outcome after shunt surgery and there were no correlations between change in CBF and change in clinical symptoms after shunt surgery.