Advances in functional and structural imaging of the brainstem: implications for disease.

Purpose Of Review: The brainstem's complex anatomy and relatively small size means that structural and functional assessment of this structure is done less frequently compared to other brain areas. However, recent years have seen substantial progress in brainstem imaging, enabling more detailed investigations into its structure and function, as well as its role in neuropathology.

Recent Findings: Advancements in ultrahigh field MRI technology have allowed for unprecedented spatial resolution in brainstem imaging, facilitating the new creation of detailed brainstem-specific atlases.

Sex, myelin, and clinical characteristics of Parkinson's disease.

Objective: To determine if there are sex differences in myelin in Parkinson's disease, and whether these explain some of the previously-described sex differences in clinical presentation.

Methods: Thirty-three subjects (23 males, 10 females) with Parkinson's disease underwent myelin water fraction (MWF) imaging, an MRI scanning technique of myelin content. MWF of 20 white matter regions of interest (ROIs) were assessed.

SSD-KD: A self-supervised diverse knowledge distillation method for lightweight skin lesion classification using dermoscopic images.

Skin cancer is one of the most common types of malignancy, affecting a large population and causing a heavy economic burden worldwide. Over the last few years, computer-aided diagnosis has been rapidly developed and make great progress in healthcare and medical practices due to the advances in artificial intelligence, particularly with the adoption of convolutional neural networks. However, most studies in skin cancer detection keep pursuing high prediction accuracies without considering the limitation of computing resources on portable devices.

Walking exercise alters pedunculopontine nucleus connectivity in Parkinson's disease in a dose-dependent manner.

Background: Gait disturbances are critical motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD). The mechanisms of gait impairment in PD are not entirely understood but likely involve changes in the Pedunculopontine Nucleus (PPN), a critical locomotion center, and its associated connections. Exercise is universally accepted as helpful in PD, but the extent and intensity of exercise required for plastic changes are unclear.

Incorporating clinical knowledge with constrained classifier chain into a multimodal deep network for melanoma detection.

In recent years, vast developments in Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) for skin diseases have generated much interest from clinicians and other eventual end-users of this technology. Introducing clinical domain knowledge to these machine learning strategies can help dispel the black box nature of these tools, strengthening clinician trust. Clinical domain knowledge also provides new information channels which can improve CAD diagnostic performance.

A Multi-sequence MRI Study in Parkinson's Disease: Association Between Rigidity and Myelin.

Background: The pathophysiology of rigidity in Parkinson's disease (PD) is poorly understood. Multi-sequence functional and structural brain MRI may further clarify the origin of this clinical characteristic.

Purpose: To examine both joint and unique relationships of MRI-based functional and structural imaging modalities to rigidity and other clinical features of PD.

Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation Improves Subnetwork Interactions in Parkinson's Disease.

Background: Activating vestibular afferents via galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) has been recently shown to have a number of complex motor effects in Parkinson's disease (PD), but the basis of these improvements is unclear. The evaluation of network-level connectivity changes may provide us with greater insights into the mechanisms of GVS efficacy.

Objective: To test the effects of different GVS stimuli on brain subnetwork interactions in both health control (HC) and PD groups using fMRI.

Novel Regional Activity Representation With Constrained Canonical Correlation Analysis for Brain Connectivity Network Estimation.

Inferring brain connectivity networks from fMRI data can take place at the Region of Interest (ROI) or voxel level. With most ROI-based approaches, the signals from same-ROI voxels are simply averaged, neglecting any inhomogeneity in each ROI and assuming that the same voxels will interact with different ROIs in a similar manner. In this paper, we propose a novel method of representing ROI activity and estimating brain connectivity that takes into account the regionally-specific nature of brain activity, the spatial location of concentrated activity, and activity in other ROIs.

ILF3 is a substrate of SPOP for regulating serine biosynthesis in colorectal cancer.

The Serine-Glycine-One-Carbon (SGOC) pathway is pivotal in multiple anabolic processes. Expression levels of SGOC genes are deregulated under tumorigenic conditions, suggesting participation of oncogenes in deregulating the SGOC biosynthetic pathway. However, the underlying mechanism remains elusive.

Dynamic Graph Theoretical Analysis of Functional Connectivity in Parkinson's Disease: The Importance of Fiedler Value.

Graph theoretical analysis is a powerful tool for quantitatively evaluating brain connectivity networks. Conventionally, brain connectivity is assumed to be temporally stationary, whereas increasing evidence suggests that functional connectivity exhibits temporal variations during dynamic brain activity. Although a number of methods have been developed to estimate time-dependent brain connectivity, there is a paucity of studies examining the utility of brain dynamics for assessing brain disease states.

Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) Augments Deficient Pedunculopontine Nucleus (PPN) Connectivity in Mild Parkinson's Disease: fMRI Effects of Different Stimuli.

Falls and balance difficulties remain a major source of morbidity in Parkinson's Disease (PD) and are stubbornly resistant to therapeutic interventions. The mechanisms of gait impairment in PD are incompletely understood but may involve changes in the Pedunculopontine Nucleus (PPN) and its associated connections. We utilized fMRI to explore the modulation of PPN connectivity by Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) in healthy controls ( = 12) and PD subjects even without overt evidence of Freezing of Gait (FOG) while on medication ( = 23).

[Analysis of tobacco site features using near-infrared spectroscopy and projection model].

In this paper, total of 5170 flue-cured tobacco samples collected from 2003 to 2012 in the domestic and foreign origin by Shanghai Tobacco Group Technical Center were tested by near infrared spectroscopy, including the typical upper leaves 1394, central 2550, the lower part of 1226. Using projection model of based on principal component and Fisher criterion (PPF), follow the projected results to get no statistically significant differences at adjacent principal components, and the number of principal components as little as possible, in this paper, four main components to build projection analysis model, the model results show that: the near-infrared spectral characteristics of the upper and lower leaves have a significant difference that can be achieved almost entirely distinguished; while the middle leaves with upper and lower have a certain degree of overlap, which is consistent to the actual situation of the continuity of tobacco leaf. At the same time, Euclidean distance between the predicted sample projection values and the mean projection values of each class in the model, a description is given for the prediction samples to quantify the extent of the site features, and its first and second close categories.

[Analysis of tobacco style features using near-infrared spectroscopy and projection model].

In the present paper, a total of 4,733 flue-cured tobacco samples collected from 2003 to 2012 in 17 provincial origins and 5 ecological areas were tested by near infrared spectroscopy, including the NONG(Luzhou) flavor 1,580 cartons, QING (Fen) flavor 2004 cartons and Intermediate flavor 1 149 cartons. Using projection model based on principal component and Fisher criterion (PPF), Projection analysis models of tobacco ecological regions and style characteristics were established. Reasonableness of style flavor division is illustrated by the model results of tobacco ecological areas.

Analysis of tobacco color and location features using visible-near infrared hyperspectral data.

In the present paper, six categories of standard industrial grading tobacco provided by Hongta Group are taken as experimental samples, including three different tobacco locations-upper (B), middle(C) and lower(X) parts, with each part containing two kinds of tobacco colors-orange (O) and lemon yellow (L). Two methods including projection model method based on principal component and Fisher criterion (PPF) and support vector machine (SVM) method are used to analyze color and location features of tobacco based on visible-near infrared hyperspectral data. The results of projection model method indicate that in the projection and similarity analysis of tobacco color, location and six tobacco groups classified by color and location, two kinds of color can be fully differentiated, of which the similarity value is -1.