Primary diffuse leptomeningeal atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumours (ATRT) of childhood: a molecularly characterised case report and literature review.

Background: Atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumours (ATRTs) are malignant central nervous system tumours, typically presenting in the posterior fossa of very young children. Prognosis remains poor despite current therapy, while tumorigenesis implicates both genomic and epigenetic dysregulation. Primary diffuse leptomeningeal (PDL) ATRT, characterised by the absence of an intraparenchymal mass lesion, is seldom reported but appears associated with a dismal outcome.

Extracting interpretable signatures of whole-brain dynamics through systematic comparison.

The brain's complex distributed dynamics are typically quantified using a limited set of manually selected statistical properties, leaving the possibility that alternative dynamical properties may outperform those reported for a given application. Here, we address this limitation by systematically comparing diverse, interpretable features of both intra-regional activity and inter-regional functional coupling from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data, demonstrating our method using case-control comparisons of four neuropsychiatric disorders. Our findings generally support the use of linear time-series analysis techniques for rs-fMRI case-control analyses, while also identifying new ways to quantify informative dynamical fMRI structures.

A worldwide study of subcortical shape as a marker for clinical staging in Parkinson's disease.

Alterations in subcortical brain regions are linked to motor and non-motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, associations between clinical expression and regional morphological abnormalities of the basal ganglia, thalamus, amygdala and hippocampus are not well established. We analyzed 3D T1-weighted brain MRI and clinical data from 2525 individuals with PD and 1326 controls from 22 global sources in the ENIGMA-PD consortium.

Embracing variability in the search for biological mechanisms of psychiatric illness.

Despite decades of research, we lack objective diagnostic or prognostic biomarkers of mental health problems. A key reason for this limited progress is a reliance on the traditional case-control paradigm, which assumes that each disorder has a single cause that can be uncovered by comparing average phenotypic values of patient and control samples. Here, we discuss the problematic assumptions on which this paradigm is based and highlight recent efforts that seek to characterize, rather than minimize, the inherent clinical and biological variability that underpins psychiatric populations.