NeuroImage. Clinical
-
NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2018
The relationship between brain atrophy and cognitive-behavioural symptoms in retired Canadian football players with multiple concussions.
Multiple concussions, particularly in contact sports, have been associated with cognitive deficits, psychiatric impairment and neurodegenerative diseases like chronic traumatic encephalopathy. We used volumetric and deformation-based morphometric analyses to test the hypothesis that repeated concussions may be associated with smaller regional brain volumes, poorer cognitive performance and behavioural symptoms among former professional football players compared to healthy controls. ⋯ Deformation-based morphometry confirmed smaller bilateral hippocampal volume that was associated with poorer verbal memory performance in athletes. Repeated concussions may lead to greater regional atrophy than expected for age.
-
NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2018
Microstructure of the superior temporal gyrus and hallucination proneness - a multi-compartment diffusion imaging study.
Previous studies reported that the volume of the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) is reduced in patients with schizophrenia and negatively correlated with hallucination severity. Moreover, diffusion-tensor imaging studies suggested a relationship between the brain microstructure in the STG of patients and auditory hallucinations. Hallucinations are also experienced in non-patient groups. ⋯ These findings suggest that there is a relationship between the volume and the microstructure of the left STG and hallucination proneness. Dendritic complexity (but not neurite density) is inversely related to hallucination proneness. Metrics based on multi-compartment diffusion models seem to be more sensitive for hallucination-related neural processes than conventional MRI-based metrics.
-
NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2018
DEWS (DEep White matter hyperintensity Segmentation framework): A fully automated pipeline for detecting small deep white matter hyperintensities in migraineurs.
Migraineurs show an increased load of white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) and more rapid deep WMH progression. Previous methods for WMH segmentation have limited efficacy to detect small deep WMHs. We developed a new fully automated detection pipeline, DEWS (DEep White matter hyperintensity Segmentation framework), for small and superficially-located deep WMHs. ⋯ Similar performance of PPV (0.96) and TPR (0.68) was attained in the validation set. DEWS showed a superior performance in comparison with other methods. Our proposed pipeline is freely available online to help the research community in quantifying deep WMHs in non-elderly adults.
-
NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2018
Mean diffusivity in cortical gray matter in Alzheimer's disease: The importance of partial volume correction.
Mean diffusivity (MD) measured by diffusion tensor imaging can reflect microstructural alterations of the brain's gray matter (GM). Therefore, GM MD may be a sensitive marker of neurodegeneration related to Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, due to partial volume effects (PVE), differences in MD may be overestimated because of a higher degree of brain atrophy in AD patients and in cases with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). ⋯ For the discrimination of AD patients and healthy controls, the effect of GM MD on diagnosis was significantly mediated by volume of hippocampus and posterior cingulate ROIs. Our results suggest that GM MD measurements are strongly confounded by PVE in the presence of brain atrophy, underlining the necessity of PVC when using these measurements as specific metrics of microstructural tissue degeneration. Independently of PVC, regional MD was not superior to regional volume in separating prodromal and clinical stages of AD from healthy controls.
-
NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2018
Transient immediate postoperative homotopic functional disconnectivity in low-grade glioma patients.
The aim of this longitudinal study is to evaluate large-scale perioperative resting state networks reorganization in patients with diffuse low-grade gliomas following awake surgery. ⋯ We found a supratentorial widely distributed functional homotopy disruption between preoperative and immediate postoperative time points with a complete restitution three months after surgery with simultaneous variation of regional cerebral blood flow.