The role of cerebellum in learned vocal communication in adult songbirds.

Injury, tumors, ischemia, and lesions in the cerebellum show the involvement of this region in human speech. The association of the cerebellum with learned birdsong has only been identified recently. Cerebellar dysfunction in young songbirds causes learning disabilities, but its role in adult songbirds has not been established.

Huperzine aggravated neurochemical and volumetric changes induced by D-galactose in the model of neurodegeneration in rats.

The multimodal MRI and H MRS study was designed to provide a structural and neurochemical view of D-galactose induced rat brain degeneration and its treatment with huperzine A. The volume changes were captured using MRI focused on the hippocampal region and a neurochemical profile was obtained from the same area using in vivo localized H MRS, which was compared with in vitroH MRS hippocampal spectra at the high field after the animals were culled. At the four week point, we observed a small decrease in N-acetylaspartate/creatine (NAA/tCr), myo-inositol/creatine (mIns/tCr) and glutamine/creatine (Gln/tCr) in the group in which neurodegeneration was induced.

Striatal Injury Induces Overall Brain Alteration at the Pallial, Thalamic, and Cerebellar Levels.

The striatal region Area X plays an important role during song learning, sequencing, and variability in songbirds. A previous study revealed that neurotoxic damage within Area X results in micro and macrostructural changes across the entire brain, including the downstream dorsal thalamus and both the upstream pallial nucleus HVC (proper name) and the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN). Here, we specify these changes on cellular and gene expression levels.

Improved tissue integrity after alginate treatment in rat spinal cord injury: evidence from ex vivo diffusion tensor imaging.

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a magnetic resonance imaging technique used to characterize fibrous structures such as white matter in the central nervous system, including normal and spinal cord injury (SCI) conditions. Our aim was to evaluate the effect of alginate treatment in the rat SCI by DTI parametric measures. Ex vivo DTI data were collected by spin echo sequence with following parameters TR/TE: 2500 ms/32 ms and b-value of 1500 s/mm2.