NeuroImage. Clinical
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Mean cortical curvature reflects cytoarchitecture restructuring in mild traumatic brain injury.
In the United States alone, the number of persons living with the enduring consequences of traumatic brain injuries is estimated to be between 3.2 and 5 million. This number does not include individuals serving in the United States military or seeking care at Veterans Affairs hospitals. The importance of understanding the neurobiological consequences of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) has increased with the return of veterans from conflicts overseas, many of who have suffered this type of brain injury. ⋯ These differences were most prominent in deep gray matter regions of the cortex. Additionally, significant relationships were found between mean cortical curvature and gray and white matter volumes (all, p < .05). These findings suggest potentially unique patterns of atrophy by region and indicate that changes in brain microstructure due to mTBI are sensitive to measures of mean curvature.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Multicenter StudyPatterns of regional gray matter loss at different stages of schizophrenia: A multisite, cross-sectional VBM study in first-episode and chronic illness.
Structural brain abnormalities in schizophrenia have been repeatedly demonstrated in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies, but it remains unclear whether these are static or progressive in nature. While longitudinal MRI studies have been traditionally used to assess the issue of progression of brain abnormalities in schizophrenia, information from cross-sectional neuroimaging studies directly comparing first-episode and chronic schizophrenia patients to healthy controls may also be useful to further clarify this issue. With the recent interest in multisite mega-analyses combining structural MRI data from multiple centers aiming at increased statistical power, the present multisite voxel-based morphometry (VBM) study was carried out to examine patterns of brain structural changes according to the different stages of illness and to ascertain which (if any) of such structural abnormalities would be specifically correlated to potential clinical moderators, including cumulative exposure to antipsychotics, age of onset, illness duration and overall illness severity. ⋯ The above data indicate that brain changes associated with the diagnosis of schizophrenia are more widespread in chronic schizophrenia compared to first-episode patients. Our findings also suggest that relative GM volume deficits may be greater in (presumably more severe) cases with earlier age of onset, as well as varying as a function of illness duration in specific frontal brain regions. Finally, our results highlight the potentially complex effects of the continued use of antipsychotic drugs on structural brain abnormalities in schizophrenia, as we found that cumulative doses of antipsychotics affected brain volumes globally rather than selectively on frontal-temporal regions.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Frontoparietal white matter integrity predicts haptic performance in chronic stroke.
Frontoparietal white matter supports information transfer between brain areas involved in complex haptic tasks such as somatosensory discrimination. The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the relationship between microstructural integrity of frontoparietal network white matter and haptic performance in persons with chronic stroke and to compare frontoparietal network integrity in participants with stroke and age matched control participants. Nineteen individuals with stroke and 16 controls participated. ⋯ A moderate to good relationship was found between ipsilesional T-M1 MD and affected hand HASTe score (r = - 0.62, p = 0.006) and less affected hand HASTe score (r = - 0.53, p = 0.022). Regression analysis revealed approximately 90% of the variance in affected hand HASTe score was predicted by the white matter integrity in the frontoparietal network (as indexed by MD) in poststroke participants while 87% of the variance in HASTe score was predicted in control participants. This study demonstrates the importance of frontoparietal white matter in mediating haptic performance and specifically identifies that T-M1 and precuneus interhemispheric tracts may be appropriate targets for piloting rehabilitation interventions, such as noninvasive brain stimulation, when the goal is to improve poststroke haptic performance.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Comparative StudyComparison of unsupervised classification methods for brain tumor segmentation using multi-parametric MRI.
Tumor segmentation is a particularly challenging task in high-grade gliomas (HGGs), as they are among the most heterogeneous tumors in oncology. An accurate delineation of the lesion and its main subcomponents contributes to optimal treatment planning, prognosis and follow-up. Conventional MRI (cMRI) is the imaging modality of choice for manual segmentation, and is also considered in the vast majority of automated segmentation studies. ⋯ In this paper, we compare the performance of several unsupervised classification methods for HGG segmentation based on MP-MRI data including cMRI, DWI, MRSI and PWI. Two independent MP-MRI datasets with a different acquisition protocol were available from different hospitals. We demonstrate that a hierarchical non-negative matrix factorization variant which was previously introduced for MP-MRI tumor segmentation gives the best performance in terms of mean Dice-scores for the pathologic tissue classes on both datasets.
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NeuroImage. Clinical · Jan 2016
Network analysis of functional brain connectivity in borderline personality disorder using resting-state fMRI.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with symptoms such as affect dysregulation, impaired sense of self, and self-harm behaviors. Neuroimaging research on BPD has revealed structural and functional abnormalities in specific brain regions and connections. However, little is known about the topological organizations of brain networks in BPD. ⋯ Lastly, the key network measures showed high correlations with several clinical symptom scores, and classified BPD patients against healthy controls with high accuracy based on linear discriminant analysis. The abnormal topological properties and connectivity found in this study may add new knowledge to the current understanding of functional brain networks in BPD. However, due to limitation of small sample sizes, the results of the current study should be viewed as exploratory and need to be validated on large samples in future works.