Physiological response to pain in patients with temporomandibular joint disorders during physiotherapy.

Pain assessment in patients with temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders during physiotherapy is a challenging yet desired task. Our study addresses two issues. First, we compare the pain perception in patients with TMJ disorders and a control group.

An Experimental and Clinical Physiological Signal Dataset for Automated Pain Recognition.

Access to large amounts of data is essential for successful machine learning research. However, there is insufficient data for many applications, as data collection is often challenging and time-consuming. The same applies to automated pain recognition, where algorithms aim to learn associations between a level of pain and behavioural or physiological responses.

Continuous Short-Term Pain Assessment in Temporomandibular Joint Therapy Using LSTM Models Supported by Heat-Induced Pain Data Patterns.

This study aims to design a time-continuous pain level assessment system for temporomandibular joint therapy. Our objectives cover verifying literature suggestions on pain stimulus, protocols for collecting reference data, and continuous pain recognition models. We use two types of pain data acquired during 1) heat stimulation and 2) temporomandibular joint therapy.

Multiparametric Assays Capture Sex- and Environment-Dependent Modifiers of Behavioral Phenotypes in Autism Mouse Models.

Background: Current phenotyping approaches for murine autism models often focus on one selected behavioral feature, making the translation onto a spectrum of autistic characteristics in humans challenging. Furthermore, sex and environmental factors are rarely considered. Here, we aimed to capture the full spectrum of behavioral manifestations in 3 autism mouse models to develop a "behavioral fingerprint" that takes environmental and sex influences under consideration.

Purkinje cell models: past, present and future.

The investigation of the dynamics of Purkinje cell (PC) activity is crucial to unravel the role of the cerebellum in motor control, learning and cognitive processes. Within the cerebellar cortex (CC), these neurons receive all the incoming sensory and motor information, transform it and generate the entire cerebellar output. The relatively homogenous and repetitive structure of the CC, common to all vertebrate species, suggests a single computation mechanism shared across all PCs.

Cognitive-Affective Functions of the Cerebellum.

The cerebellum, traditionally associated with motor coordination and balance, also plays a crucial role in various aspects of higher-order function and dysfunction. Emerging research has shed light on the cerebellum's broader contributions to cognitive, emotional, and reward processes. The cerebellum's influence on autonomic function further highlights its significance in regulating motivational and emotional states.

Delay eyeblink conditioning performance and brain-wide c-Fos expression in male and female mice.

Delay eyeblink conditioning has been extensively used to study associative learning and the cerebellar circuits underlying this task have been largely identified. However, there is a little knowledge on how factors such as strain, sex and innate behaviour influence performance during this type of learning. In this study, we used male and female mice of C57BL/6J (B6) and B6CBAF1 strains to investigate the effect of sex, strain and locomotion in delay eyeblink conditioning.

Haploinsufficiency Leads to Pax2 Dysregulation in the Developing Murine Cerebellum.

Tuberous sclerosis complex 1 (TSC1) is a tumor suppressor that promotes the inhibition of mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, and mutations in lead to a rare complex disorder of the same name. Despite phenotype heterogeneity, up to 50% of TSC patients present with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Consequently, TSC models are often used to probe molecular and behavioral mechanisms of ASD development.

Purkinje Cell Activity in the Medial and Lateral Cerebellum During Suppression of Voluntary Eye Movements in Rhesus Macaques.

Volitional suppression of responses to distracting external stimuli enables us to achieve our goals. This volitional inhibition of a specific behavior is supposed to be mainly mediated by the cerebral cortex. However, recent evidence supports the involvement of the cerebellum in this process.

A Novel Automated Approach for Improving Standardization of the Marble Burying Test Enables Quantification of Burying Bouts and Activity Characteristics.

The marble burying test is a commonly used paradigm to describe phenotypes in mouse models of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. The current methodological approach relies predominantly on reporting the number of buried marbles at the end of the test. By measuring the proxy of the behavior (buried marbles), many important characteristics regarding the temporal aspect of this assay are lost.

Activated PI3Kδ syndrome, an immunodeficiency disorder, leads to sensorimotor deficits recapitulated in a murine model.

The phosphoinositide-3-kinase (PI3K) family plays a major role in cell signaling and is predominant in leukocytes. Gain-of-function (GOF) mutations in the gene lead to the development of activated PI3Kδ syndrome (APDS), a rare primary immunodeficiency disorder. A subset of APDS patients also displays neurodevelopmental delay symptoms, suggesting a potential role of in cognitive and behavioural function.

Multimodal Signal Analysis for Pain Recognition in Physiotherapy Using Wavelet Scattering Transform.

Fascial therapy is an effective, yet painful, procedure. Information about pain level is essential for the physiotherapist to adjust the therapy course and avoid potential tissue damage. We have developed a method for automatic pain-related reaction assessment in physiotherapy due to the subjectivity of a self-report.

Supporting diagnostics and therapy planning for percutaneous ablation of liver and abdominal tumors and pre-clinical evaluation.

Percutaneous ablation methods are used to treat primary and metastatic liver tumors. Image guided navigation support minimally invasive interventions of rigid anatomical structures. When working with the displacement and deformation of soft tissues during surgery, as in the abdomen, imaging navigation systems are in the preliminary implementation stage.

Glissades Are Altered by Lesions to the Oculomotor Vermis but Not by Saccadic Adaptation.

Saccadic eye movements enable fast and precise scanning of the visual field, which is partially controlled by the posterior cerebellar vermis. Textbook saccades have a straight trajectory and a unimodal velocity profile, and hence have well-defined epochs of start and end. However, in practice only a fraction of saccades matches this description.

Normal cognitive and social development require posterior cerebellar activity.

Cognitive and social capacities require postnatal experience, yet the pathways by which experience guides development are unknown. Here we show that the normal development of motor and nonmotor capacities requires cerebellar activity. Using chemogenetic perturbation of molecular layer interneurons to attenuate cerebellar output in mice, we found that activity of posterior regions in juvenile life modulates adult expression of eyeblink conditioning (paravermal lobule VI, crus I), reversal learning (lobule VI), persistive behavior and novelty-seeking (lobule VII), and social preference (crus I/II).

Cerebellar Granule Cells: Dense, Rich and Evolving Representations.

For half a century it was assumed that granule cells use ultra-sparse encoding, but now in vivo calcium-imaging studies have shown that large ensembles of granule cells provide dense signals, which themselves evolve and adapt during training.

Cerebellar granule cells acquire a widespread predictive feedback signal during motor learning.

Cerebellar granule cells, which constitute half the brain's neurons, supply Purkinje cells with contextual information necessary for motor learning, but how they encode this information is unknown. Here we show, using two-photon microscopy to track neural activity over multiple days of cerebellum-dependent eyeblink conditioning in mice, that granule cell populations acquire a dense representation of the anticipatory eyelid movement. Initially, granule cells responded to neutral visual and somatosensory stimuli as well as periorbital airpuffs used for training.

Modeled changes of cerebellar activity in mutant mice are predictive of their learning impairments.

Translating neuronal activity to measurable behavioral changes has been a long-standing goal of systems neuroscience. Recently, we have developed a model of phase-reversal learning of the vestibulo-ocular reflex, a well-established, cerebellar-dependent task. The model, comprising both the cerebellar cortex and vestibular nuclei, reproduces behavioral data and accounts for the changes in neural activity during learning in wild type mice.

Cerebellar associative sensory learning defects in five mouse autism models.

Sensory integration difficulties have been reported in autism, but their underlying brain-circuit mechanisms are underexplored. Using five autism-related mouse models, Shank3+/ΔC, Mecp2(R308/Y), Cntnap2-/-, L7-Tsc1 (L7/Pcp2(Cre)::Tsc1(flox/+)), and patDp(15q11-13)/+, we report specific perturbations in delay eyeblink conditioning, a form of associative sensory learning requiring cerebellar plasticity. By distinguishing perturbations in the probability and characteristics of learned responses, we found that probability was reduced in Cntnap2-/-, patDp(15q11-13)/+, and L7/Pcp2(Cre)::Tsc1(flox/+), which are associated with Purkinje-cell/deep-nuclear gene expression, along with Shank3+/ΔC.

Fast calcium sensor proteins for monitoring neural activity.

A major goal of the BRAIN Initiative is the development of technologies to monitor neuronal network activity during active information processing. Toward this goal, genetically encoded calcium indicator proteins have become widely used for reporting activity in preparations ranging from invertebrates to awake mammals. However, slow response times, the narrow sensitivity range of Ca and in some cases, poor signal-to-noise ratio still limit their usefulness.

The cerebellum, sensitive periods, and autism.

Cerebellar research has focused principally on adult motor function. However, the cerebellum also maintains abundant connections with nonmotor brain regions throughout postnatal life. Here we review evidence that the cerebellum may guide the maturation of remote nonmotor neural circuitry and influence cognitive development, with a focus on its relationship with autism.

A cerebellar learning model of vestibulo-ocular reflex adaptation in wild-type and mutant mice.

Mechanisms of cerebellar motor learning are still poorly understood. The standard Marr-Albus-Ito theory posits that learning involves plasticity at the parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapses under control of the climbing fiber input, which provides an error signal as in classical supervised learning paradigms. However, a growing body of evidence challenges this theory, in that additional sites of plasticity appear to contribute to motor adaptation.