brain AND connectivity

OBJECTIVE: To explore the changes in the cerebral microstructure of patients with noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). METHOD: Overall, 122 patients with NIHL (mild [MP, n = 79], relatively severe patients [including moderate and severe; RSP, n = 32], and undetermined [lost to follow-up, n = 11]) and 84 healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled. All clinical data, including age, education level, hearing threshold, occupation type, noise exposure time, and some scale scores (including the Mini-Mental State Examination [MMSE], tinnitus handicap inventory [THI], and Hamilton Anxiety Scale [HAMA]), were collected and analyzed...

Communication is challenging for disabled individuals, but with advancement of brain-computer interface (BCI) systems, alternative communication systems can be developed. Current BCI spellers, such as P300, SSVEP, and MI, have drawbacks like reliance on external stimuli or conversation irrelevant mental tasks. In contrast to these systems, Imagined speech based BCI systems rely on directly decoding the vowels/words user is thinking, making them more intuitive, user friendly and highly popular among Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) researchers...

A comprehensive three-dimensional digital brain atlas of cortical and subcortical regions based on MRI and histology has a broad array of applications in anatomical, functional, and clinical studies. We first generated a Subcortical Atlas of the Marmoset, called the "SAM," from 251 delineated subcortical regions (e.g. thalamic subregions, etc.) derived from high-resolution Mean Apparent Propagator-MRI, T2W, and magnetization transfer ratio images ex vivo. We then confirmed the location and borders of these segmented regions in the MRI data using matched histological sections with multiple stains obtained from the same specimen...

Brain tumour can be cured if it is initially screened and given timely treatment to the patients. This proposed idea suggests a transform- and windowing-based optimization strategy for exposing and segmenting the tumour region in brain pictures. The processes of image processing that are included in the proposed idea include preprocessing, transformation, feature extraction, feature optimization, classification, and segmentation. In order to convert the pixels connected to the spatial domain into a multi-resolution domain, the Gabor transform is first applied to the brain test image...

Ageing is a heterogeneous multisystem process involving different rates of decline in physiological integrity across biological systems. The current study dissects the unique and common variance across body and brain health indicators and parses inter-individual heterogeneity in the multisystem ageing process. Using machine-learning regression models on the UK Biobank data set (N = 32,593, age range 44.6-82.3, mean age 64.1 years), we first estimated tissue-specific brain age for white and gray matter based on diffusion and T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data, respectively...

Machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being applied to neuroimaging data. Studies in neuroscience typically have to rely on a limited set of training data which may impair the generalizability of ML models. However, it is still unclear which kind of training sample is best suited to optimize generalization performance. In the present study, we systematically investigated the generalization performance of sex classification models trained on the parcelwise connectivity profile of either single samples or compound samples of two different sizes...

Functional gradient (FG) analysis represents an increasingly popular methodological perspective for investigating brain hierarchical organization but whether and how network hierarchy changes concomitant with functional connectivity alterations in multiple sclerosis (MS) has remained elusive. Here, we analyzed FG components to uncover possible alterations in cortical hierarchy using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data acquired in 122 MS patients and 97 healthy control (HC) subjects. Cortical hierarchy was assessed by deriving regional FG scores from rs-fMRI connectivity matrices using a functional parcellation of the cerebral cortex...

Bioelectronic medicine are an emerging class of treatments aiming to modulate body nervous activity to correct pathological conditions and restore health. Recently, it was shown that the high frequency electrical neuromodulation of the carotid sinus nerve (CSN), a small branch of the glossopharyngeal nerve that connects the carotid body (CB) to the brain, restores metabolic function in type 2 diabetes (T2D) animal models highlighting its potential as a new therapeutic modality to treat metabolic diseases in humans...

INTRODUCTION: Physical activity influences psychological well-being. This study aimed to determine the impact of exercise intensity on psychological well-being and alterations in emotion-related brain functional connectivity (FC). METHODS: Twenty young, healthy, trained athletes performed a low- and high-intensity interval exercise (LIIE and HIIE) as well as a control condition in a within-subject crossover design. Before and after each condition, Positive And Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) was assessed as well as resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI)...

Shadows, as all other objects that surround us, are incorporated into the body and extend the body mediating perceptual information. The current study investigates the hypothesis according to which the perception of object shadows would predict the perception of body shadows. 38 participants (19 males and 19 females) aged 23 years on average were immersed into a virtual reality environment and instructed to perceive and indicate the coincidence or non coincidence between the movement of a ball shadow with regard to ball movement on the one hand, and between their body shadow and their body position in space on the other...

OBJECTIVE: The fully automatic segmentation of glioma and its subregions is fundamental for computer-aided clinical diagnosis of tumors. In the segmentation process of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), convolutional neural networks with small convolutional kernels can only capture local features and are ineffective at integrating global features, which narrows the receptive field and leads to insufficient segmentation accuracy. This study aims to use dilated convolution to address the problem of inadequate global feature extraction in 3D-UNet...

The brain contains thousands of millions of synapses, exhibiting diverse structural, molecular, and functional characteristics. However, synapses can be classified into two primary morphological types: Gray's type I and type II, corresponding to Colonnier's asymmetric (AS) and symmetric (SS) synapses, respectively. AS and SS have a thick and thin postsynaptic density, respectively. In the cerebral cortex, since most AS are excitatory (glutamatergic), and SS are inhibitory (GABAergic), determining the distribution, size, density, and proportion of the two major cortical types of synapses is critical, not only to better understand synaptic organization in terms of connectivity, but also from a functional perspective...

BACKGROUND: A seminal study found higher subgenual frontal cortex resting-state connectivity with 2 left ventral frontal regions and the dorsal midbrain to predict better response to psychotherapy versus medication in individuals with treatment-naïve major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we examined whether these subgenual networks also play a role in the pathophysiology of clinical outcomes in MDD with early treatment resistance in primary care. METHODS: Forty-five people with current MDD who had not responded to ≥2 serotonergic antidepressants ( n  = 43, meeting predefined functional magnetic resonance imaging minimum quality thresholds) were enrolled and followed over 4 months of standard care...

Functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI and sMRI) are complementary approaches that can be used to study longitudinal brain changes in adolescents. Each individual modality offers distinct insights into the brain. Each individual modality may overlook crucial aspects of brain analysis. By combining them, we can uncover hidden brain connections and gain a more comprehensive understanding. In previous work, we identified multivariate patterns of change in whole-brain function during adolescence...

INTRODUCTION: Early psychosis (EP) is a critical period in the course of psychotic disorders during which the brain is thought to undergo rapid and significant functional and structural changes 1 . Growing evidence suggests that the advent of psychotic disorders is early alterations in the brain's functional connectivity and structure, leading to aberrant neural network organization. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is a global effort to map the human brain's connectivity in healthy and disease populations; within HCP, there is a specific dataset that focuses on the EP subjects (i...

Neuronal reconstruction-a process that transforms image volumes into 3D geometries and skeletons of cells- bottlenecks the study of brain function, connectomics and pathology. Unlike artistic domains with similar challenges (e.g., hair modeling), scientists need exact and complete segmentations to study subtle topological differences. Existing methods are diskbound, dense-access, coupled, single-threaded, algorithmically unscalable and require manual cropping of small windows and proofreading of skeletons due to low topological accuracy...

UNLABELLED: Number sense is essential for early mathematical development but it is compromised in children with mathematical disabilities (MD). Here we investigate the impact of a personalized 4-week Integrated Number Sense (INS) tutoring program aimed at improving the connection between nonsymbolic (sets of objects) and symbolic (Arabic numerals) representations in children with MD. Utilizing neural pattern analysis, we found that INS tutoring not only improved cross-format mapping but also significantly boosted arithmetic fluency in children with MD...

Humans evolved an extraordinarily expanded and complex cerebral cortex, associated with developmental and gene regulatory modifications 1-3 . Human accelerated regions (HARs) are highly conserved genomic sequences with human-specific nucleotide substitutions. Although there are thousands of annotated HARs, their functional contribution to human-specific cortical development is largely unknown 4,5 . HARE5 is a HAR transcriptional enhancer of the WNT signaling receptor Frizzled8 (FZD8) active during brain development 6 ...

The intrinsic dynamics of human brain activity display a recurring pattern of anti-correlated activity between the default mode network (DMN), associated with internal processing and mentation, and task positive regions, associated with externally directed attention. In human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, this anti-correlated pattern is detectable on the infraslow timescale (<0.1 Hz) as a quasi-periodic pattern (QPP). While the DMN is implicated in creativity and musicality in traditional time-averaged functional connectivity studies, no one has yet explored how creative training may alter dynamic spatiotemporal patterns involving the DMN such as QPPs...

High-amplitude co-activation patterns are sparsely present during resting-state fMRI but drive functional connectivity 1-5 . Further, they resemble task activation patterns and are well-studied 3,5-10 . However, little research has characterized the remaining majority of the resting-state signal. In this work, we introduced caricaturing-a method to project resting-state data to a subspace orthogonal to a manifold of co-activation patterns estimated from the task fMRI data. Projecting to this subspace removes linear combinations of these co-activation patterns from the resting-state data to create Caricatured connectomes...