MS optic neuritis-induced long-term structural changes within the visual pathway.

Background: The visual pathway is commonly involved in multiple sclerosis (MS), even in its early stages, including clinical episodes of optic neuritis (ON). The long-term structural damage within the visual compartment in patients with ON, however, is yet to be elucidated.

Objective: Our aim was to characterize visual system structure abnormalities using MRI along with optical coherence tomography (OCT) and pattern-reversal visual evoked potentials (VEPs) depending on a single history of ON.

Electroencephalography reveals a selective disruption of cognitive control processes in craving cigarette smokers.

Addiction to nicotine is extremely challenging to overcome, and the intense craving for the next cigarette often leads to relapse in smokers who wish to quit. To dampen the urges of craving and inhibit unwanted behaviour, smokers must harness cognitive control, which is itself impaired in addiction. It is likely that craving may interact with cognitive control, and the present study sought to test the specificity of such interactions.

Cortical, subcortical and spinal neural correlates of slackline training-induced balance performance improvements.

Humans develop posture and balance control during childhood. Interestingly, adults can also learn to master new complex balance tasks, but the underlying neural mechanisms are not fully understood yet. Here, we combined broad scale brain connectivity fMRI at rest and spinal excitability measurements during movement.

Prefrontal cortical thickness in motor neuron disease.

Objective: To examine whether the distribution of prefrontal cortical thickness in patients with motor neuron disease is normal or bimodal and how it compares to the normal population.

Methods: 158 patients with motor neuron disease (MND) and 86 healthy controls (HC) were enrolled in a prospective, two-center study with a common structural MRI protocol. Cortical thickness measures were extracted for the prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, motor cortex, and occipital cortex using FreeSurfer, adjusted for age and sex, and tested for normality of distribution.

Attention to Color Sharpens Neural Population Tuning via Feedback Processing in the Human Visual Cortex Hierarchy.

Attention can facilitate the selection of elementary object features such as color, orientation, or motion. This is referred to as feature-based attention and it is commonly attributed to a modulation of the gain and tuning of feature-selective units in visual cortex. Although gain mechanisms are well characterized, little is known about the cortical processes underlying the sharpening of feature selectivity.

Widespread temporo-occipital lobe dysfunction in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Recent studies suggest that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) lie on a single clinical continuum. However, previous neuroimaging studies have found only limited involvement of temporal lobe regions in ALS. To better delineate possible temporal lobe involvement in ALS, the present study aimed to examine changes in functional connectivity across the whole brain, particularly with regard to extra-motor regions, in a group of 64 non-demented ALS patients and 38 healthy controls.

Memory-Efficient Analysis of Dense Functional Connectomes.

The functioning of the human brain relies on the interplay and integration of numerous individual units within a complex network. To identify network configurations characteristic of specific cognitive tasks or mental illnesses, functional connectomes can be constructed based on the assessment of synchronous fMRI activity at separate brain sites, and then analyzed using graph-theoretical concepts. In most previous studies, relatively coarse parcellations of the brain were used to define regions as graphical nodes.

Basal ganglia pathology in ALS is associated with neuropsychological deficits.

Objectives: To evaluate basal ganglia changes along the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-ALS-frontotemporal dementia (FTD) continuum using multiple, complementary imaging techniques.

Methods: Sixty-seven C9orf72-negative patients with ALS and 39 healthy controls were included in a cross-sectional quantitative MRI study. Seven patients with ALS met criteria for comorbid behavioral variant FTD (ALS-FTD), 18 patients met the Strong criteria for cognitive and/or behavioral impairment (ALS-Plus), and 42 patients had no cognitive impairment (ALS-Nci).

Structural hallmarks of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis progression revealed by probabilistic fiber tractography.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive limb and/or bulbar muscular weakness and atrophy. Although ALS-related alterations of motor and extra-motor neuronal networks have repeatedly been reported, their temporal dynamics during disease progression are not well understood. Recently, we reported a decline of motor system activity and a concurrent increase of hippocampal novelty-evoked modulations across 3 months of ALS progression.

Fast construction of voxel-level functional connectivity graphs.

Background: Graph-based analysis of fMRI data has recently emerged as a promising approach to study brain networks. Based on the assessment of synchronous fMRI activity at separate brain sites, functional connectivity graphs are constructed and analyzed using graph-theoretical concepts. Most previous studies investigated region-level graphs, which are computationally inexpensive, but bring along the problem of choosing sensible regions and involve blurring of more detailed information.