Publications by authors named "Bettyann Chodkowski"
Article Synopsis
- Childhood obesity rates in the US have nearly doubled over the past 30 years, with associated increases in impulsivity and unhealthy eating habits linked to brain connectivity.
- A study analyzing brain images of 38 children (ages 8-13) found that increased impulsivity-related brain connectivity corresponds with higher levels of adiposity (measured using BMI) and unhealthy eating behaviors.
- The findings suggest that children with greater impulsivity and biased brain connectivity are more likely to engage in excessive eating behaviors, highlighting a critical period for addressing these issues early in development.
Background: Neuroimaging studies in younger adults have demonstrated sex differences in brain processing of painful experimental stimuli. Such differences may contribute to findings that women suffer disproportionately from pain. It is not known whether sex-related differences in pain processing extend to older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReliability and reproducibility of perfusion MRI in cognitively normal subjects.
Magn Reson Imaging
November 2010
Article Synopsis
- Arterial spin labeling (ASL) MRI is a noninvasive technique for measuring brain perfusion, allowing for repeated scans, but its reliability over time needs further investigation.
- A study examined the reliability and reproducibility of ASL in 12 cognitively normal elderly individuals, who were scanned four times over a year; results showed high initial reliability that decreased moderately over time.
- The findings suggest that while ASL can effectively measure cerebral blood flow, factors like varying slice positioning over time contribute to reduced reliability in long-term studies.
Damage to specific white matter tracts within the spinal cord can often result in the particular neurological syndromes that characterize myelopathies such as traumatic spinal cord injury. Noninvasive visualization of these tracts with imaging techniques that are sensitive to microstructural integrity is an important clinical goal. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)- and magnetization transfer (MT)-derived quantities have shown promise in assessing tissue health in the central nervous system.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe human spinal cord contains segregated sensory and motor pathways that have been difficult to quantify using conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. Multiple sclerosis is characterized by both focal and spatially diffuse spinal cord lesions with heterogeneous pathologies that have limited attempts at linking MRI and behaviour. We used a novel magnetization-transfer-weighted imaging approach to quantify damage to spinal white matter columns and tested its association with sensorimotor impairment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndependent component analysis (ICA) decomposes fMRI data into spatially independent maps and their corresponding time courses. However, distinguishing the neurobiologically and biophysically reasonable components from those representing noise and artifacts is not trivial. We present a simple method for the ranking of independent components, by assessing the resemblance between components estimated from all the data, and components estimated from only the odd- (or even-) numbered time points.
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