The visual cortex and visual cognition in Huntington's disease: An overview of current literature.

The processing of visual stimuli from retina to higher cortical areas has been extensively studied in the human brain. In Huntington's disease (HD), an inherited neurodegenerative disorder, it is suggested that visual processing deficits are present in addition to more characteristic signs such as motor disturbances, cognitive dysfunction, and behavioral changes. Visual deficits are clinically important because they influence overall cognitive performance and have implications for daily functioning.

The perisylvian language network and language analytical abilities.

Aiming at exploring the brain's structural organisation underlying successful second language learning, we investigate the anatomy of the perisylvian language network in a group of healthy adults, consisting of participants with high and average language analytical abilities. Utilising deterministic tractography, six tracts per participant (left and right long direct segment, left and right indirect anterior segment and left and right indirect posterior segment) were virtually dissected and measurements pertaining to their microstructural organisation were collected. Our results obtained by means of linear discriminant analysis pointed to mean diffusivity (MD) values of three tracts (right anterior, left long and left anterior segments) as best discriminating between the two groups.

In vivo visualization of the locus coeruleus in humans: quantifying the test-retest reliability.

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a brainstem nucleus involved in important cognitive functions. Recent developments in neuroimaging methods and scanning protocols have made it possible to visualize the human LC in vivo by utilizing a T-weighted turbo spin echo (TSE) scan. Despite its frequent use and its application as a biomarker for tracking the progress of monoaminergic-related neurodegenerative diseases, no study to date has investigated the reproducibility and inter-observer variability of LC identification using this TSE scan sequence.

New insights in the neuroanatomy of the human adult superior hypogastric plexus and hypogastric nerves.

Background: The superior hypogastric plexus (SHP) is an autonomic plexus, located ventrally to the abdominal aorta and its bifurcation, innervating pelvic viscera. It is classically described as being composed of merely sympathetic fibres. However, post-operative complications after surgery damaging the peri-aortic retroperitoneal compartment suggest the existence of parasympathetic fibres.

Three-dimensional inversion recovery manganese-enhanced MRI of mouse brain using super-resolution reconstruction to visualize nuclei involved in higher brain function.

The visualization of activity in mouse brain using inversion recovery spin echo (IR-SE) manganese-enhanced MRI (MEMRI) provides unique contrast, but suffers from poor resolution in the slice-encoding direction. Super-resolution reconstruction (SRR) is a resolution-enhancing post-processing technique in which multiple low-resolution slice stacks are combined into a single volume of high isotropic resolution using computational methods. In this study, we investigated, first, whether SRR can improve the three-dimensional resolution of IR-SE MEMRI in the slice selection direction, whilst maintaining or improving the contrast-to-noise ratio of the two-dimensional slice stacks.