Publications by authors named "Aakash Agrawal"

Learning to read places a strong challenge on the visual system. Years of expertise lead to a remarkable capacity to separate similar letters and encode their relative positions, thus distinguishing words such as FORM and FROM, invariantly over a large range of positions, sizes and fonts. How neural circuits achieve invariant word recognition remains unknown.

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Child-directed print corpora enable systematic psycholinguistic investigations, but this research infrastructure is not available in many understudied languages. Moreover, researchers of understudied languages are dependent on manual tagging because precise automatized parsers are not yet available. One plausible way forward is to limit the intensive work to a small-sized corpus.

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Background: Vascular Parkinsonism (VP) is characterized by rigidity and bradykinesia predominantly affecting the lower limbs. Optical Coherence tomography (OCT) facilitates the visualization of retina and choroid and may help in delineating differential involvement of retina and choroid in patients with VP. In this study, we report the pattern of changes in the retinal and choroidal layers in patients with VP with the help of spectral domain OCT (SD-OCT).

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Introduction: Vascular parkinsonism (VaP), type of lower body parkinsonism, occurs in relation to ischemic cerebrovascular disease. It can be associated with cognitive impairment. We aimed to study the cortical excitability changes in these patients using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

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In expert readers, a brain region known as the visual word form area (VWFA) is highly sensitive to written words, exhibiting a posterior-to-anterior gradient of increasing sensitivity to orthographic stimuli whose statistics match those of real words. Using high-resolution 7-tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we ask whether, in bilingual readers, distinct cortical patches specialize for different languages. In 21 English-French bilinguals, unsmoothed 1.

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Fluent reading is an important milestone in education, but we lack a clear understanding of why children vary so widely in attaining it. Language-related factors such as rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness have been identified as important factors that explain reading fluency. However, whether any aspects of visual orthographic processing also explain reading fluency beyond phonology is unclear.

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Background: Idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH) is characterized by the clinical triad of gait disturbance, urinary incontinence, and memory impairment with normal cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used to assess the corticospinal motor pathways in patients with iNPH with conflicting results.

Methods: Our study included 11 patients with iNPH and 13 healthy controls.

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We read jubmled wrods effortlessly, but the neural correlates of this remarkable ability remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that viewing a jumbled word activates a visual representation that is compared to known words. To test this hypothesis, we devised a purely visual model in which neurons tuned to letter shape respond to longer strings in a compositional manner by linearly summing letter responses.

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Reading causes widespread changes in the brain, but its effect on visual word representations is unknown. Learning to read may facilitate visual processing by forming specialized detectors for longer strings or by making word responses more predictable from single letters-that is, by increasing compositionality. We provided evidence for the latter hypothesis using experiments that compared nonoverlapping groups of readers of two Indian languages (Telugu and Malayalam).

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The spectrum of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein antibody (MOG-Ab) associated demyelination is evolving. Our case report describes a unique clinical presentation of aseptic meningitis with demyelinating lesions of the brain resembling acute disseminated encephalomyelitis and MOG-Ab seropositivity. A 22-year-old lady presented with history of fever of one week duration followed by headache, vomiting and neck stiffness.

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Ethnopharmacological Relevance: In the past years, the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) has undergone remarkable changes in all therapeutic modes. The present newfangled care in clinical research is to determine and to pick a new track for better treatment options for RA. Recent ethnopharmacological investigations revealed that traditional herbal remedies are the most preferred modality of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

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