Manual lymph drainage may not have a preventive effect on the development of breast cancer-related lymphoedema in the long term: a randomised trial.

Question: What are the short-term and long-term preventive effects of manual lymph drainage (MLD), when used in addition to information and exercise therapy, on the development of lymphoedema after axillary dissection for breast cancer?

Design: Randomised controlled trial with concealed allocation, blinded assessors and intention-to-treat analysis.

Participants: Adults undergoing unilateral dissection for breast cancer were recruited, with 79 allocated to the experimental group and 81 to the control group.

Intervention: The experimental group received guidelines about prevention of lymphoedema, exercise therapy and MLD.

Diffusion MRI-based cortical connectome reconstruction: dependency on tractography procedures and neuroanatomical characteristics.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI)-based tractography offers unique abilities to map whole-brain structural connections in human and animal brains. However, dMRI-based tractography indirectly measures white matter tracts, with suboptimal accuracy and reliability. Recently, sophisticated methods including constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD) and global tractography have been developed to improve tract reconstructions through modeling of more complex fiber orientations.