Monitoring Ischemic Cerebral Injury in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats by Diffusion Tensor Imaging.

Aim: We have applied diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to interrogate microstructural changes in white matter integrity in a widely used middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model of cerebral ischemia.

Material And Methods: We performed ex vivo DTI 35 days after 60 minutes transient focal ischemia in male spontaneously hypertensive rats and generated fractional anisotropy (FA), mean, axial and radial diffusivity maps. Regions of interest corresponding to external capsule (EC), corpus callosum (CC) and internal capsule (IC) were compared among sham and stroked rats.

Microsurgical anatomy of the dorsal thoracic rootlets and dorsal root entry zones.

Background: For successful DREZ (dorsal root entry zone) surgery, optimal neuroanatomical orientation and precise microsurgical dissection are required. Although cervical, lumbar, and sacral spinal segments have been studied in detail, such information is not available for thoracic segments. The objective of this anatomical study is to comprehensively illustrate the microanatomical features of the thoracic DREZs and their variations.