Lumbar Paraspinal Compartment Syndrome in an Active-Duty Army Special Operations Aviation Soldier.

Lumbar paraspinal muscle compartment syndrome is an uncommon, rapidly progressive, and potentially devastating injury with fewer than 40 cases reported in the literature. It initially mimics nonemergent causes of low back pain, disproportionately affects young men, and is most often secondary to acute physical exertion. The disease process is commonly associated with rhabdomyolysis.

Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome.

Post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (PI-ME/CFS) is a disabling disorder, yet the clinical phenotype is poorly defined, the pathophysiology is unknown, and no disease-modifying treatments are available. We used rigorous criteria to recruit PI-ME/CFS participants with matched controls to conduct deep phenotyping. Among the many physical and cognitive complaints, one defining feature of PI-ME/CFS was an alteration of effort preference, rather than physical or central fatigue, due to dysfunction of integrative brain regions potentially associated with central catechol pathway dysregulation, with consequences on autonomic functioning and physical conditioning.

A case of spontaneous tumor lysis syndrome in an adolescent with abdominal pain.

Tumor lysis syndrome (TLS) is an acutely life threatening, must-not miss, oncological emergency that infrequently presents to the emergency department (ED). This diagnosis is typically a complication of chemotherapy, however, TLS can also occur spontaneously as the first presentation of malignancy. This case discusses the rare presentation of an otherwise healthy adolescent male who presented to the ED with abdominal pain and lethargy and was subsequently found to be in acute renal failure and pancytopenic with the associated lab derangements of hyperkalemia, hyperphosphatemia, and hypocalcemia.

Multimodal imaging of essential tremor and dystonic tremor.

Despite recent advances in tremor and dystonia classification, it remains difficult to discriminate essential tremor from dystonic tremor as they are similar in appearance and no biomarker exists. Further, tremor can appear in the same or a different body part than the dystonia. The aim of the current study was to better understand the differential pathophysiology of these tremors.

Dynamics of Top-Down Control and Motor Networks in Parkinson's Disease.

Background: Motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients might be related to high-level task-control deficits. We aimed at investigating the dynamics between sensorimotor network and top-down control networks (frontal-parietal, cingulo-opercular, and cerebellar) in PD and at determining the effects of levodopa on the dynamics of these networks.

Methods: We investigated dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), during resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging, between sensorimotor network and top-down control networks in 36 PD patients (OFF medication, PD-OFF) and 36 healthy volunteers.

Innovative Human Three-Dimensional Tissue-Engineered Models as an Alternative to Animal Testing.

Animal testing has long been used in science to study complex biological phenomena that cannot be investigated using two-dimensional cell cultures in plastic dishes. With time, it appeared that more differences could exist between animal models and even more when translated to human patients. Innovative models became essential to develop more accurate knowledge.

Long lasting attentional-context dependent visuomotor memory.

Using a dual-task paradigm, we recently reported that visuomotor adaptation acquired under distraction of a secondary attention-demanding discrimination task could be remembered only when a similar distraction was present. In contrast, when tested without the distracting task, performance reverted to untrained levels (Song & Bédard, 2015). Here, we demonstrated that this newfound paradoxical benefit of consistent dual-task context lasts over 1 day, such that visuomotor memory retrieval is enhanced under conditions where it is more difficult to engage in attentional selection of the motor task.

Encoding attentional states during visuomotor adaptation.

We recently showed that visuomotor adaptation acquired under attentional distraction is better recalled under a similar level of distraction compared to no distraction. This paradoxical effect suggests that attentional state (e.g.

Paradoxical benefits of dual-task contexts for visuomotor memory.

It is generally thought that increased attention helps when one is learning a new task. However, using a dual-task paradigm, we showed that the rate of visuomotor learning was the same regardless of attentional distraction caused by a secondary task. Yet, when participants were tested later, a motor skill learned under distraction was remembered only when a similar distraction was present; when participants were tested without the distracting task, their performance reverted to untrained levels.

Brain representations for acquiring and recalling visual-motor adaptations.

Humans readily learn and remember new motor skills, a process that likely underlies adaptation to changing environments. During adaptation, the brain develops new sensory-motor relationships, and if consolidation occurs, a memory of the adaptation can be retained for extended periods. Considerable evidence exists that multiple brain circuits participate in acquiring new sensory-motor memories, though the networks engaged in recalling these and whether the same brain circuits participate in their formation and recall have less clarity.

Attention modulates generalization of visuomotor adaptation.

Generalization represents the ability to transfer what has been learned in one context to another context beyond limited experience. Because acquired motor representations often have to be reinstated in a different or novel environment, generalization is a crucial part of visuomotor learning. In daily life, training for new motor skills often occurs in a complex environment, in which dividing attentional resources for multiple stimuli is required.

Allocation of attention for dissociated visual and motor goals.

In daily life, selecting an object visually is closely intertwined with processing that object as a potential goal for action. Since visual and motor goals are typically identical, it remains unknown whether attention is primarily allocated to a visual target, a motor goal, or both. Here, we dissociated visual and motor goals using a visuomotor adaptation paradigm, in which participants reached toward a visual target using a computer mouse or a stylus pen, while the direction of the cursor was rotated 45° counter-clockwise from the direction of the hand movement.

Investigating brain connectivity using mixed effects vector autoregressive models.

We propose a mixed-effects vector auto-regressive (ME-VAR) model for studying brain effective connectivity. One common approach to investigating inter-regional associations in brain activity is the multivariate auto-regressive (VAR) model. The standard VAR model unrealistically assumes the connectivity structure to be identical across all participants in a study and therefore, could yield misleading results.

Basal ganglia-dependent processes in recalling learned visual-motor adaptations.

Humans learn and remember motor skills to permit adaptation to a changing environment. During adaptation, the brain develops new sensory-motor relationships that become stored in an internal model (IM) that may be retained for extended periods. How the brain learns new IMs and transforms them into long-term memory remains incompletely understood since prior work has mostly focused on the learning process.

Brain activation related to combinations of gaze position, visual input, and goal-directed hand movements.

Humans reach to and acquire objects by transforming visual targets into action commands. How the brain integrates goals specified in a visual framework to signals into a suitable framework for an action plan requires clarification whether visual input, per se, interacts with gaze position to formulate action plans. To further evaluate brain control of visual-motor integration, we assessed brain activation, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

On a basal ganglia role in learning and rehearsing visual-motor associations.

Fronto-striatal circuitry interacts with the midbrain dopaminergic system to mediate the learning of stimulus-response associations, and these associations often guide everyday actions, but the precise role of these circuits in forming and consolidating rules remains uncertain. A means to examine basal ganglia circuit contributions to associative motor learning is to examine these process in a lesion model system, such as Parkinson's disease (PD), a basal ganglia disorder characterized by the loss of dopamine neurons. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare brain activation of PD patients with a group of healthy aged-match participants during a visual-motor associative learning task that entailed discovering and learning arbitrary associations between a set of six visual stimuli and corresponding spatial locations by moving a joystick-controlled cursor.

Gaze and hand position effects on finger-movement-related human brain activation.

Humans commonly use their hands to move and to interact with their environment by processing visual and proprioceptive information to determine the location of a goal-object and the initial hand position. It remains elusive, however, how the human brain fully uses this sensory information to generate accurate movements. In monkeys, it appears that frontal and parietal areas use and combine gaze and hand signals to generate movements, whereas in humans, prior work has separately assessed how the brain uses these two signals.

Gaze influences finger movement-related and visual-related activation across the human brain.

The brain uses gaze orientation to organize myriad spatial tasks including hand movements. However, the neural correlates of gaze signals and their interaction with brain systems for arm movement control remain unresolved. Many studies have shown that gaze orientation modifies neuronal spike discharge in monkeys and activation in humans related to reaching and finger movements in parietal and frontal areas.

Movement planning of video and of manual aiming movements.

We studied aiming performance of adults for video- and manual aiming tasks when they had visual information about the location of the starting base or when they had not. In video-aiming, foveating the starting base and then the target prior to movement initiation (Foveation) resulted in less aiming bias and variability than when the starting base was not visible (PNV), or visible without the participants foveating it prior to movement initiation (PSV). In manual aiming, Foveation and PSV procedures resulted in identical results but reduced aiming bias and variability in comparison to the PNV procedures.

On-line vs. off-line utilization of peripheral visual afferent information to ensure spatial accuracy of goal-directed movements.

Manual aiming movements are often initiated when one gazes at the target, while the hand is seen in peripheral vision. The objective of the present study was to determine whether vision of one's hand in peripheral vision and/or central vision as it progresses towards the target can be used to modulate the direction and the extent components of the initial movement impulse. Participants performed video aiming movements while vision of the cursor they were moving was permitted for its whole trajectory, 40 degrees to 15 degrees of visual angle, 15 degrees to 0 degrees of visual angle, or not visible at all.

On the role of peripheral visual afferent information for the control of rapid video-aiming movements.

It has been shown that, even for very fast and short duration movements, seeing one's hand in peripheral vision, or a cursor representing it on a video screen, resulted in a better direction accuracy of a manual aiming movement than when the task was performed while only the target was visible. However, it is still unclear whether this was caused by on-line or off-line processes. Through a novel series of analyses, the goal of the present study was to shed some light on this issue.