From Phineas Gage and Monsieur Leborgne to H.M.: Revisiting Disconnection Syndromes.

On the 50th anniversary of Norman Geschwind's seminal paper entitled 'Disconnexion syndrome in animal and man', we pay tribute to his ideas by applying contemporary tractography methods to understand white matter disconnection in 3 classic cases that made history in behavioral neurology. We first documented the locus and extent of the brain lesion from the computerized tomography of Phineas Gage's skull and the magnetic resonance images of Louis Victor Leborgne's brain, Broca's first patient, and Henry Gustave Molaison. We then applied the reconstructed lesions to an atlas of white matter connections obtained from diffusion tractography of 129 healthy adults.

The Surgical Illustrator: a web enabled computer program for documenting clinical and procedural details.

The medical record not only stores information on actions taken regarding patient care but it is also a source of education for those who read it. Nurses, residents, interns, students and consulting clinicians look to the medical record to gain an understanding of clinical disease and the diagnostic studies and treatment regimens used to affect the disease. We have presented our initial findings and our framework for developing and evaluating The Surgical Illustrator, a software program that will enable clinicians to include in EMRs information that is usually hand drawn in traditional medical records.

Visible Human 2.0--the next generation.

The National Library of Medicine has initiated the development of new anatomical methods and techniques for the acquisition of higher resolution data sets, aiming to address the anatomical artifacts encountered in the development of the Visible Human Male and Female and to insure enhanced detection of structures, providing data in greater depth and breadth. Given this framework, we acquired a complete data set of the head and neck. CT and MR scans were also obtained with registration hardware inserted prior to imaging.

The tale of Phineas Gage, digitally remastered.

The injury of Phineas Gage has fueled research on and fascination with the localization of cerebral functions in the past century and a half. Most physicians and anatomists believed that Gage sustained a largely bilateral injury to the frontal lobes. However, previous studies seem to have overlooked a few less obvious, but essential details.