Neuropsychological patterns in magnetic resonance imaging-defined subgroups of patients with degenerative dementia.

We hypothesized that specific neuropsychological deficits were associated with specific patterns of atrophy. A magnetic resonance imaging volumetric study and a neuropsychological protocol were obtained for patients with several frontotemporal lobar dementia phenotypes including a social/dysexecutive (SOC/EXEC, n = 17), progressive nonfluent aphasia (n = 9), semantic dementia (n = 7), corticobasal syndrome (n = 9), and Alzheimer's disease (n = 21). Blinded to testing results, patients were partitioned according to pattern of predominant cortical atrophy; our partitioning algorithm had been derived using seriation, a hierarchical classification technique.

Prelude to passion: limbic activation by "unseen" drug and sexual cues.

Background: The human brain responds to recognizable signals for sex and for rewarding drugs of abuse by activation of limbic reward circuitry. Does the brain respond in similar way to such reward signals even when they are "unseen", i.e.

Race differences in the age at diagnosis among medicaid-eligible children with autism.

Objective: To examine racial differences in the age at which Medicaid-eligible children first receive an autistic disorder (AD) diagnosis and to examine time in mental health treatment until an AD diagnosis was received.

Method: Philadelphia Medicaid specialty mental health claims identified 406 children who received services in 1999 for AD. Claims from 1993-1999 were used to identify the date of first mental health visit, first receipt of AD diagnosis, and number of visits occurring between those dates.

Relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and whole-brain N-acetylaspartate measurement: evidence for different clinical cohorts initial observations.

Purpose: To quantify the rate of concentration decline of neuronal marker N-acetylaspartate (NAA) in the entire brain of patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (MS) in relation to healthy age-matched control subjects.

Materials And Methods: Whole-brain NAA (WBNAA) concentration was quantified in 49 patients with relapsing-remitting MS by using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and proton MR spectroscopy. It was statistically analyzed by using Spearman rank correlation coefficients to test the intragroup relationship between WBNAA and Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) score and Mann-Whitney analyses to test for differences between subgroups' EDSS scores versus previously published WBNAA values for healthy subjects, disease duration, and age.

Integrating postprocessed functional MR images with picture archiving and communication systems.

We describe a method of converting postprocessed functional MR images to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard and sending these DICOM images directly into any picture archiving and communication system (PACS) or stand-alone DICOM database. This method provides system-wide access and archiving of previously research-only applications, it permits the clinical review of postprocessed data on DICOM-compliant workstations, and it can be used to move functional MR data onto intraoperative neuronavigational workstations for surgical guidance. The procedure can be used with any MR postprocessed dataset, and it can be extended to other imaging modalities.