Publications by authors named "E E J Raven"
In response to a growing interest in refining brain connectivity assessments, this study focuses on integrating white matter fiber-specific microstructural properties into structural connectomes. Spanning ages 8-19 years in a developmental sample, it explores age-related patterns of microstructure-informed network properties at both local and global scales. First, the diffusion-weighted signal fraction associated with each tractography-reconstructed streamline was constructed.
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- The hippocampus, located in the medial temporal lobe, plays a key role in cognitive functions, but its development during childhood and adolescence hasn't been thoroughly studied, focusing mainly on overall volume rather than finer microstructural details.
- This study analyzed the microstructural changes in the hippocampus across a sample of children and adolescents using advanced diffusion MRI techniques, revealing significant age-related changes in neurite and soma properties, despite no notable changes in overall size or structure.
- Findings showed an increase in neurite-related MR signals and a decrease in diffusivity, indicating complex developmental patterns in how hippocampal microstructure evolves across different age groups.
With increasing numbers of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets becoming publicly available, researchers and clinicians alike have turned to automated methods of segmentation to enable population-level analyses of these data. Although prior research has evaluated the extent to which automated methods recapitulate "gold standard" manual segmentation methods in the human brain, such an evaluation has not yet been carried out for segmentation of MRIs of the macaque brain. Macaques offer the important opportunity to bridge gaps between microanatomical studies using invasive methods like tract tracing, neural recordings, and high-resolution histology and non-invasive macroanatomical studies using methods like MRI.
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- Neuroanatomical changes during adolescence, observed through MRI, show significant cortical thinning and volume loss, but the cellular mechanisms behind these changes have not been clearly understood until now.
- Recent advancements in MRI technology allowed researchers to analyze the microstructure of the cortex in children and adolescents, revealing that neurite signal increases and soma radius decreases with age, indicating ongoing neural development.
- The study also found an increase in gene expression related to oligodendrocytes and excitatory neurons, suggesting that myelination processes are crucial for cortical maturation during adolescence and into early adulthood.
Affective touch-a slow, gentle, and pleasant form of touch-activates a different neural network than which is activated during discriminative touch in humans. Affective touch perception is enabled by specialized low-threshold mechanoreceptors in the skin with unmyelinated fibers called C tactile (CT) afferents. These CT afferents are conserved across mammalian species, including macaque monkeys.
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