The role of carotid elongation for intervention time and outcome in mechanical thrombectomy for anterior circulation acute ischemic stroke.

Introduction: This study investigates the influence of carotid artery elongation on neurovascular intervention and outcome in acute stroke treatments proposing an easily assessable imaging marker for carotid elongation.

Methods: 118 patients who underwent mechanical thrombectomy for middle cerebral artery occlusions were included. The carotid elongation ratio (CER), center-line artery length to scan's Z-axis, was measured on the affected side in CT-angiographies.

Reproducibility and across-site transferability of an improved deep learning approach for aneurysm detection and segmentation in time-of-flight MR-angiograms.

This study aimed to (1) replicate a deep-learning-based model for cerebral aneurysm segmentation in TOF-MRAs, (2) improve the approach by testing various fully automatic pre-processing pipelines, and (3) rigorously validate the model's transferability on independent, external test-datasets. A convolutional neural network was trained on 235 TOF-MRAs acquired on local scanners from a single vendor to segment intracranial aneurysms. Different pre-processing pipelines including bias field correction, resampling, cropping and intensity-normalization were compared regarding their effect on model performance.

Normal cohorts in automated brain atrophy estimation: how many healthy subjects to include?

Objectives: This study investigates the influence of normal cohort (NC) size and the impact of different NCs on automated MRI-based brain atrophy estimation.

Methods: A pooled NC of 3945 subjects (NC) was retrospectively created from five publicly available cohorts. Voxel-wise gray matter volume atrophy maps were calculated for 48 Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (55-82 years) using veganbagel and dynamic normal templates with an increasing number of healthy subjects randomly drawn from NC (initially three, and finally 100 subjects).

Impact of defacing on automated brain atrophy estimation.

Background: Defacing has become mandatory for anonymization of brain MRI scans; however, concerns regarding data integrity were raised. Thus, we systematically evaluated the effect of different defacing procedures on automated brain atrophy estimation.

Methods: In total, 268 Alzheimer's disease patients were included from ADNI, which included unaccelerated (n = 154), within-session unaccelerated repeat (n = 67) and accelerated 3D T1 imaging (n = 114).

Differential effects of TSPO ligands on mitochondrial function in mouse microglia cells.

The translocator protein 18 kDa (TSPO), initially characterized as peripheral benzodiazepine receptor, is a conserved outer mitochondrial membrane protein, implicated in cholesterol transport thereby affecting steroid hormone biosynthesis, as well as in general mitochondrial function related to bioenergetics, oxidative stress, and Ca homeostasis. TSPO is highly expressed in steroidogenic tissues such as adrenal glands, but shows low expression in the central nervous system. During various disease states such as inflammation, neurodegeneration or cancer, the expression of mitochondrial TSPO in affected tissues is upregulated.

Role of anoctamins in cancer and apoptosis.

Anoctamin 1 (TMEM16A, Ano1) is a recently identified Ca(2+)-activated chloride channel and a member of a large protein family comprising 10 paralogues. Before Ano1 was identified as a chloride channel protein, it was known as the cancer marker DOG1. DOG1/Ano1 is expressed in gastrointestinal stromal tumours (GIST) and particularly in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, at very high levels never detected in other tissues.

Airway epithelial cells--functional links between CFTR and anoctamin dependent Cl- secretion.

Airways consist of a heterogeneous population of cells, comprising ciliated cells, Clara cells and goblet cells. Electrolyte secretion by the airways is necessary to produce the airway surface liquid that allows for mucociliary clearance of the lungs. Secretion is driven by opening of Cl(-) selective ion channels in the apical membrane of airway epithelial cells, through either receptor mediated increase in intracellular cAMP or cytosolic Ca(2+).