Publications by authors named "Dave Cash"

The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) Core has been operating since Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative's (ADNI) inception, providing 20 years of data including reliable, multi-platform standardized protocols, carefully curated image data, and quantitative measures provided by expert investigators. The overarching purposes of the MRI Core include: (1) optimizing and standardizing MRI acquisition methods, which have been adopted by many multicenter studies and trials worldwide and (2) providing curated images and numeric summary values from relevant MRI sequences/contrasts to the scientific community. Over time, ADNI MRI has become increasingly complex.

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The presymptomatic brain changes of granulin (GRN) disease, preceding by years frontotemporal dementia, has not been fully characterized. New approaches focus on the spatial chronnectome can capture both spatial network configurations and their dynamic changes over time. To investigate the spatial dynamics in 141 presymptomatic GRN mutation carriers and 282 noncarriers from the Genetic Frontotemporal dementia research Initiative cohort.

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Article Synopsis
  • Increasing age is a major risk factor for dementia, with changes related to Alzheimer's disease potentially developing years before symptoms appear.
  • Molecular imaging techniques like PET and MRI help to identify these changes, allowing for earlier detection and intervention before cognitive symptoms manifest.
  • The "Insight 46" study is monitoring 500 individuals from the 1946 British birth cohort to examine the progression of dementia-related changes over time, collecting data through various methods and aiming to identify preclinical stages of Alzheimer's.
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Article Synopsis
  • Crowding affects the ability to recognize objects amid clutter and particularly impacts visual perception in those with neurodegenerative diseases affecting the occipital cortices.
  • In a study comparing individuals with posterior cortical atrophy, Alzheimer’s disease, and healthy controls, researchers found that patients with posterior cortical atrophy struggled more with letter identification in tightly spaced scenarios, indicating a significant impact of crowding.
  • The findings imply that crowding may operate as a pre-attentive process influenced by structural brain changes, specifically indicating that the impaired accuracy aligns with averaging effects rather than direct substitution of visual elements.
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Reading deficits are a common early feature of the degenerative syndrome posterior cortical atrophy (PCA) but are poorly understood even at the single word level. The current study evaluated the reading accuracy and speed of 26 PCA patients, 17 typical Alzheimer's disease (tAD) patients and 14 healthy controls on a corpus of 192 single words in which the following perceptual properties were manipulated systematically: inter-letter spacing, font size, length, font type, case and confusability. PCA reading was significantly less accurate and slower than tAD patients and controls, with performance significantly adversely affected by increased letter spacing, size, length and font (cursive < non-cursive), and characterised by visual errors (69% of all error responses).

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Accurately identifying the patients that have mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who will go on to develop Alzheimer's disease (AD) will become essential as new treatments will require identification of AD patients at earlier stages in the disease process. Most previous work in this area has centred around the same automated techniques used to diagnose AD patients from healthy controls, by coupling high dimensional brain image data or other relevant biomarker data to modern machine learning techniques. Such studies can now distinguish between AD patients and controls as accurately as an experienced clinician.

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Background: Propionibacterium acnes is a common pathogen in infections after shoulder surgery. Recent reports found positive P acnes cultures in a high percentage of patients who had revision shoulder arthroplasty for "aseptic loosening" without any overt signs of infection. Isolation of P acnes is difficult, and by use of conventional microbiological protocols of 48-hour incubation, a considerable proportion of patients with possible P acnes infection may remain unidentified.

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