Editorial: «Interventional Neuroradiology: a Neuroscience sub-specialty?».

Interventional Neuroradiology (INR) is not bound by the classical limits of a speciality, and is not restricted by standard formats of teaching and education. Open and naturally linked towards neurosciences, INR has become a unique source of novel ideas for research, development and progress allowing new and improved approaches to challenging pathologies resulting in better anatomo-clinical results. Opening INR to Neurosciences is the best way to keep it alive and growing.

«Interventional Neuroradiology: a neuroscience sub-specialty?».

Interventional Neuroradiology (INR) is not bound by the classical limits of a specialty, and is not restricted by standard formats of teaching and education. Open and naturally linked towards neurosciences, INR has become a unique source of novel ideas for research, development and progress allowing new and improved approaches to challenging pathologies resulting in better anatomo-clinical results. Opening INR to Neurosciences is the best way to keep it alive and growing.

Oxytocin facilitates protective responses to aversive social stimuli in males.

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) can enhance the impact of positive social cues but may reduce that of negative ones by inhibiting amygdala activation, although it is unclear whether the latter causes blunted emotional and mnemonic responses. In two independent double-blind placebo-controlled experiments, each involving over 70 healthy male subjects, we investigated whether OXT affects modulation of startle reactivity by aversive social stimuli as well as subsequent memory for them. Intranasal OXT potentiated acoustic startle responses to negative stimuli, without affecting behavioral valence or arousal judgments, and biased subsequent memory toward negative rather than neutral items.

Cerebral lesions can impair fMRI-based language lateralization.

Purpose: Several small patient studies and case reports raise concerns that the reliability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) may be impaired in the vicinity of cerebral lesions. This could affect the clinical validity of fMRI for presurgical language lateralization. The current study sets out to identify if a systematic effect of lesion type and localization on fMRI exists.

Strongly lateralized activation in language fMRI of atypical dominant patients-implications for presurgical work-up.

Purpose: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is being used increasingly for language dominance assessment in the presurgical work-up of patients with pharmacoresistant epilepsy. However, the interpretation of bilateral fMRI-activation patterns is difficult. Various studies propose fMRI-lateralization index (LI) thresholds between +/-0.

A novel, self-expanding, nitinol stent in medically refractory intracranial atherosclerotic stenoses: the Wingspan study.

Background And Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the safety and performance of the Wingspan stent system and Gateway percutaneous transluminal angioplasty balloon catheter in the treatment of high-grade, intracranial atherosclerotic lesions in patients who had failed medical therapy.

Methods: In this prospective, multicenter, single-arm study, medically refractory patients with a modified Rankin score < or =3 and recurrent symptoms attributable to angiographically demonstrated intracranial stenosis > or =50% in a vessel 2.5 to 4.

"Soundmorphing": a new approach to studying speech perception in humans.

A problem in current studies of brain activation in speech perception is that most studies use stimuli that are sampled from different categories. This study presents a new approach in creating acoustic stimuli by filtering real words in different ways, thus this enables one to 'morph' the sounds gradually from something like tones to real words while preserving temporal characteristics ("soundmorphing"). This will make it possible to explore steps between tone and speech processing on a gradual scale.

Differences of cerebral activation between superior and inferior learners during motor sequence encoding and retrieval.

Cerebral activation during memory encoding and retrieval might depend on subjects' learning capacity, either by corresponding to better performance in superior learners or by reflecting increased effort in inferior learners. To investigate these alternative hypotheses, the study compared cerebral activation during encoding and retrieval of a motor sequence in groups of subjects with superior and inferior learning performances. Ten healthy subjects underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while performing a motor sequence encoding paradigm (i.

Evidence for a dysfunctional retrosplenial cortex in patients with schizophrenia: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study with a semantic-perceptual contrast.

We investigated whether the retrosplenial and the posterior cingulate cortex (RS-PCC) is functionally impaired in schizophrenia patients. Therefore, we measured functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal changes associated with a synonym-judgment task known to activate, among other areas, the RS-PCC. Compared to 12 matched control subjects, 12 schizophrenia patients exhibited reliably weaker activations in the RS-PCC, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the left orbitofrontal cortex (P < 0.

Cranial magnetic resonance imaging in genetically proven myotonic dystrophy type 1 and 2.

Cranial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 19 German patients with genetically proven myotonic dystrophy Type 1 (DM1, n = 10) or Type 2 (DM2, n = 9) showed pathological findings consisting of white matter lesions (WML) and/or brain atrophy in 9/10 DM1 and 8/9 DM2 patients. Anterior temporal WML (ATWML) were exclusively seen in DM1 patients. Our findings indicate a high frequency of central nervous system (CNS) involvement in both disorders.

Using visual advance information: an event-related functional MRI study.

Our event-related functional MRI (efMRI) study investigates whether visual advance information (AI) affects rather perceptual or central response-related processing areas. Twelve subjects were required to make a go/no-go decision to a conjunction of a specific color and motion direction. The stimuli were preceded by a cue, providing 100% valid advance information about motion direction.

Temporal and cerebellar brain regions that support both declarative memory formation and retrieval.

Using event-related fMRI, we scanned young healthy subjects while they memorized real-world photographs and subsequently tried to recognize them within a series of new photographs. We confirmed that activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and inferior prefrontal cortex correlates with declarative memory formation as defined by the subsequent memory effect, stronger responses to subsequently remembered than forgotten items. Additionally, we confirmed that activity in specific regions within the parietal lobe, anterior prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate and cerebellum correlate with recognition memory as measured by the conventional old/new effect, stronger responses for recognized old items (hits) than correctly identified new items (correct rejections).

Functional segregation of the temporal lobes into highly differentiated subsystems for auditory perception: an auditory rapid event-related fMRI-task.

With this study, we explored the blood oxygen level-dependent responses within the temporal lobe to short auditory stimuli of different classes. To address this issue, we performed an attentive listening event-related fMRI study, where subjects were required to concentrate during the presentation of different types of stimuli. Because the order of stimuli was randomized and not predictable for the subject, the observed differences between the stimuli types were interpreted as an automatic effect and were not affected by attention.

In vivo voxel-based morphometry in multiple system atrophy of the cerebellar type.

Background: Multiple system atrophy (MSA) is a sporadic neurodegenerative disease. According to the clinical presentation a parkinsonian type and a cerebellar type (MSA-C) are distinguished.

Objective: To study the morphological alterations of MSA-C-affected brains in vivo using voxel-based morphometric analysis of magnetic resonance images.

Menstrual cycle-dependent neural plasticity in the adult human brain is hormone, task, and region specific.

In rodents, cyclically fluctuating levels of gonadal steroid hormones modulate neural plasticity by altering synaptic transmission and synaptogenesis. Alterations of mood and cognition observed during the menstrual cycle suggest that steroid-related plasticity also occurs in humans. Cycle phase-dependent differences in cognitive performance have almost exclusively been found in tasks probing lateralized neuronal domains, i.