[A male patient with acute, reversible blindness].

Background: Intra-arterial thrombectomy (IAT) in occlusions of the posterior cerebral artery (PCA) is uncommon and not a proven therapeutic solution, but can be performed in individual cases.

Case Description: An 80 year old man visited the emergency room after experiencing acute blindness. This was caused by a new hemianopia for the left visual field due to an occlusion of the right PCA, on top of a pre-existing hemianopia for the right visual field.

Absence of an infarct on MRI is not uncommon after clinical diagnosis of ischemic stroke.

Introduction: An infarct on brain MRI is often seen as gold standard when diagnosing ischemic stroke. Although MRI has high sensitivity in detecting a lesion shortly after ischemic stroke, this rapidly declines when time progresses. We assessed the occurrence of a negative MRI 4-6 weeks after a discharge diagnosis of ischemic stroke, and compared the clinical characteristics of patients with a positive or negative MRI.

The Location and Effects of Visual Hemisphere-Specific Stimulation on Reading Fluency in Children With the Characteristics of Dyslexia.

Fluency is used as an indicator of reading proficiency. Many students with reading disabilities are unable to benefit from typical interventions. This study is designed to replicate Lorusso, Facoetti, Paganoni, Pezzani, and Molteni's (2006) work using FlashWord, a computer program that tachistoscopically presents words in the right or left visual hemi-field in English and locates through fMRI imaging the processing areas involved in fluency development.

PAIS 2 (Paracetamol [Acetaminophen] in Stroke 2): Results of a Randomized, Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trial.

Background And Purpose: Subfebrile body temperature and fever in the first days after stroke are strongly associated with unfavorable outcome. A subgroup analysis of a previous trial suggested that early treatment with paracetamol may improve functional outcome in patients with acute stroke and a body temperature of ≥36.5°C.

Interaction of attention and acoustic factors in dichotic listening for fused words.

Two dichotic listening experiments examined the degree to which the right-ear advantage (REA) for linguistic stimuli is altered by a "top-down" variable (i.e., directed attention) in conjunction with selected "bottom-up" (acoustic) variables.

[A man with vision problems after coronary angiography].

A 71-year-old man underwent a coronary angiography (CAG). Afterwards he experienced vision loss. Neurologic examination revealed bilateral cortical blindness.

Quality of Life after Young Ischemic Stroke of Mild Severity Is Mainly Influenced by Psychological Factors.

Background: Long-term prognosis in terms of quality of life (QoL) in young stroke patients is of importance because they usually have a long life expectancy and extensive daily life demands. We aimed at determining which medical and psychological factors influence the QoL in young stroke patients (<50 years), after long-term follow-up.

Methods: Young ischemic stroke patients admitted to the St.

A method to analyze low signal-to-noise ratio functional magnetic resonance imaging data.

The current practice of using a single, representative hemodynamic response function (canonical HRF) to model functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is questionable given the trial-to-trial variability of the brain's responses. In addition, the changes in blood-oxygenation level due to sensory stimulation may be small, especially when auditory stimuli are used. Here we introduce a correlation-based single trial analysis method for fMRI data analysis to deal with the low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio and variability of the HRF in response to repeated, identical auditory stimuli.

Long-term cognitive outcome of ischaemic stroke in young adults.

Background: Long-term prognosis in terms of cognition in young stroke patients is very important because these patients usually still have a long life expectancy and rather extensive daily life demands. However, little is known on cognitive deficits in these patients. We aimed to evaluate cognitive function in young stroke patients (<50 years) after long-term follow-up.

Image and emotion: from outcomes to brain behavior.

Aim: A systematic review of neuroscience articles on the emotional states of fear, anxiety, and pain to understand how emotional response is linked to the visual characteristics of an image at the level of brain behavior.

Background: A number of outcome studies link exposure to visual images (with nature content) to improvements in stress, anxiety, and pain perception. However, an understanding of the underlying perceptual mechanisms has been lacking.

Dynamic multi-channel TMS with reconfigurable coil.

Investigations of the causal involvement of particular brain areas and interconnections in behavior require an external stimulation system with reasonable spatio-temporal resolution. Current transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technology is limited to stimulating a single brain area once in a given trial. Here, we present a feasibility study for a novel TMS system based on multi-channel reconfigurable coils.

A computational model for generation of the P300 evoked potential component.

The P300 is an endogenously evoked potential with amplitude and latency depending on the amount of information carried by the stimulus rather than its physical characteristics. It has been suggested that P300 is a manifestation of the context updating mechanism in the human working memory. We present a neural network-based model that mimics the learning and forgetting mechanisms of external stimuli in the human working memory that are believed to be responsible for P300 generation.

Auditory evoked potentials of adults who do or do not show a significant right ear advantage in dichotic listening.

The Halwes Fused Dichotic Words Test was used to divide a sample of university students into a group having a statistically significant right ear advantage (REA) and a group having either a significant left ear advantage or a non-significant ear asymmetry (NREA). Of these participants, 30 (14 REA, 16 NREA) had electrical potentials measured from temporal, central, and frontal sites as series of brief tones were presented monaurally. No behavioural response was required.

Sensory gating-out and gating-in in normal and schizophrenic participants.

In contrast to sensory gating, the brain's ability to re-respond to relevant stimuli and the potential differences between healthy and schizophrenic participants have not been studied in great detail. Here, we explore what auditory paradigms are useful to measure this re-responding ability. Evoked potentials (EPs) were obtained from the Cz channel using 3 paired stimulus paradigms (pairs with equal stimuli {PE}, the second stimulus being lower {PL} or higher {PH} in frequency) and 2 short-train paradigms in which 5 identical stimuli were followed by a lower frequency stimulus (train lower {TL}) or higher frequency stimulus (train higher {TH}).

Impact of visual art on patient behavior in the emergency department waiting room.

Background: Wait times have been reported to be one of the most important concerns for people visiting emergency departments (EDs). Affective states significantly impact perception of wait time. There is substantial evidence that art depicting nature reduces stress levels and anxiety, thus potentially impacting the waiting experience.

On the relationship between human sensorimotor adaptability and event-related potentials.

It was explored if the speed with which an individual learns to deal with new environments and challenges can be predicted on the basis of his/her brain's response to irrelevant (repeating) and novel auditory stimuli. In this study, 26 subjects threw 30 light-weight balls at a target with and without vision-distorting goggles. The horizontal displacement from a bull's-eye target was measured and the rate and degree of adaptation were computed.

The effect of stimulus expectancy on dishabituation of auditory evoked potentials.

Objectives: Having foreknowledge of the type and timing of sensory stimulation modulates the electrophysiological response and can result in short-term habituation. Here we explore if dishabituation is similarly affected.

Methods: Seventeen healthy subjects were tested with five different auditory stimuli paradigms to see if knowledge of the stimulus train length and/or deviant stimulus affects the amount of dishabituation of auditory evoked potentials.

Auditory evoked potential variability in healthy and schizophrenia subjects.

Objectives: To investigate if the reduced P50, N100 and P200 auditory evoked potential (EP) components and gating deficits seen in schizophrenia can be explained in terms of response incompleteness.

Methods: Twenty-five healthy and schizophrenia participants were studied using pairs of 1000Hz tones (S1 and S2, 0.5s apart) separated by 8.

Evoked potential variability.

An unsupervised correlation-based clustering method was developed to assess the trial-to-trial variability of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs). The method first decomposes single trials into three frequency bands, each containing activity primarily associated with one of the three major AEP components, i.e.

A double dissociation between somatosensory processing for perception and action.

Human neuropsychology suggests that there are two distinct body representations. Body image and body schema are, respectively, thought to be involved in conscious perceptual judgments and unconscious sensorimotor guidance. The evidence is based on the double dissociation between disorders of perceptual detection and sensorimotor guidance.

Oscillatory neural network for pattern recognition: trajectory based classification and supervised learning.

Computer algorithms that match human performance in recognizing written text or spoken conversation remain elusive. The reasons why the human brain far exceeds any existing recognition scheme to date in the ability to generalize and to extract invariant characteristics relevant to category matching are not clear. However, it has been postulated that the dynamic distribution of brain activity (spatiotemporal activation patterns) is the mechanism by which stimuli are encoded and matched to categories.

A pilot study of rivastigmine in the treatment of delirium after stroke: a safe alternative.

Background: Delirium is a common disorder in the early phase of stroke. Given the presumed cholinergic deficiency in delirium, we tested treatment with the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor rivastigmine.

Methods: This pilot study was performed within an epidemiological study.

Target probability affects the likelihood that a P300 will be generated in response to a target stimulus, but not its amplitude.

The ensemble-averaged P300 amplitude is affected by global and local target probability and interstimulus interval. We hypothesize that the local target probability-induced amplitude changes arise from a failure to consistently produce a P300 rather than producing lower amplitude responses. Single-trial analysis was conducted on auditory P300 data from 13 healthy subjects to determine the absence or presence of a P300 component for each target response separately.

Is P50 an epiphenomenon?

The mid-latency auditory evoked response (MLAER) consists of the P50, N100 and P200 components. P50 is widely used to examine sensory gating. There is growing evidence that phase-reorganization of the oscillatory components comprising EEG activity, and especially in the 4-8 Hz (theta) band, is responsible for MLAER generation.

Artifacts, habituation and p300-based brain machine interfaces.

We investigated to what degree the detection rate of the P300 in single trial event-related potentials is affected by short-term and long-term habituation effects, and we present an algorithm to eliminate eye-movement artifacts. Data from 26 subjects were collected using a visual oddball paradigm. P300 components were detected using a threshold algorithm operating on the delta band (0-4 Hz).