Sports-related peripheral nerve injuries of the upper limb.

Peripheral nerve injuries in athletes affect the upper limb more commonly than the lower limb. Common mechanisms include compression, traction, laceration, and ischemia. Specific sports can have unique mechanisms of injury and are more likely to be associated with certain neuropathies.

Stress Fractures of the Hip and Pelvis.

Stress fractures refer to overuse injuries of bone resulting from repetitive mechanical stress. Stress fractures of the hip and pelvic region, while relatively uncommon, have become increasingly recognized in certain populations, particularly long-distance runners and military recruits. The diagnosis of such injuries can be challenging, often hampered by a nonspecific physical examination and limited sensitivity of plain radiography.

Design for Transtibial Modifiable Socket for Immediate Postoperative Prosthesis.

Amputations are long-standing surgical procedures that have been performed for centuries; however, very little attention and urgency have been given to immediate restoration of movement and return to a normal lifestyle. In many cases, the time between amputation and prosthetic fitting can pause recovery and development of new routines. To increase recovery, immediate postoperative prostheses (IPOPs) have been developed yet these are under-utilized because of concerns for wound healing and complications with vascular diseases.

Effectiveness of conservative treatment for patellofemoral pain syndrome: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Objective: To evaluate the evidence regarding the effectiveness of conservative treatment in reducing patellofemoral pain.

Data Sources: CENTRAL, MEDLINE, CINAHL, and PEDro databases.

Study Selection: Adults with patellofemoral pain, randomized controlled trials only, any conservative treatment compared with placebo, sham, other conservative treatment, or no treatment.

Patellofemoral Pain.

Patellofemoral pain is characterized by insidious onset anterior knee pain that is exaggerated under conditions of increased patellofemoral joint stress. A variety of risk factors may contribute to the development of patellofemoral pain. It is critical that the history and physical examination elucidate those risk factors specific to an individual in order to prescribe an appropriate and customized treatment plan.

Update on rehabilitation of patellofemoral pain.

Patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) is a multifactorial disorder with a variety of treatment options. The assortment of components that contribute to its pathophysiology can be categorized into local joint impairments, altered lower extremity biomechanics, and overuse. A detailed physical examination permits identification of the unique contributors for a given individual and permits the formation of a precise, customized treatment plan.

Cortical and hippocampal atrophy in patients with autosomal dominant familial Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Both familial and sporadic Alzheimer's disease (AD) result in progressive cortical and subcortical atrophy. Familial autosomal dominant AD (FAD) allows us to study AD brain changes presymptomatically.

Methods: 33 subjects at risk for FAD (25 for PSEN1 and 8 for APP mutations; 22 mutation carriers and 11 controls) and 3 demented PSEN1 mutation carriers underwent T(1)-weighted MPRAGE 1.

Mapping corpus callosum morphology in twin pairs discordant for bipolar disorder.

Callosal volume reduction has been observed in patients with bipolar disorder, but whether these deficits reflect genetic vulnerability to the illness remains unresolved. Here, we used computational methods to map corpus callosum abnormalities in a population-based sample of twin pairs discordant for bipolar disorder. Twenty-one probands with bipolar I disorder (mean age 44.

Three-dimensional surface maps link local atrophy and fast ripples in human epileptic hippocampus.

Objectives: There is compelling evidence that pathological high-frequency oscillations (HFOs), called fast ripples (FR, 150-500Hz), reflect abnormal synchronous neuronal discharges in areas responsible for seizure genesis in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). It is hypothesized that morphological changes associated with hippocampal atrophy (HA) contribute to the generation of FR, yet there is limited evidence that hippocampal FR-generating sites correspond with local areas of atrophy.

Methods: Interictal HFOs were recorded from hippocampal microelectrodes in 10 patients with MTLE.

Joint sulcal detection on cortical surfaces with graphical models and boosted priors.

In this paper, we propose an automated approach for the joint detection of major sulci on cortical surfaces. By representing sulci as nodes in a graphical model, we incorporate Markovian relations between sulci and formulate their detection as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation problem over the joint space of major sulci. To make the inference tractable, a sample space with a finite number of candidate curves is automatically generated at each node based on the Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton of sulcal regions.

Semi-automated method for delineation of landmarks on models of the cerebral cortex.

Sulcal and gyral landmarks on the human cerebral cortex are required for various studies of the human brain. Whether used directly to examine sulcal geometry, or indirectly to drive cortical surface registration methods, the accuracy of these landmarks is essential. While several methods have been developed to automatically identify sulci and gyri, their accuracy may be insufficient for certain neuroanatomical studies.

Three-dimensional hippocampal atrophy maps distinguish two common temporal lobe seizure-onset patterns.

Purpose: Current evidence suggests that the mechanisms underlying depth electrode-recorded seizures beginning with hypersynchronous (HYP) onset patterns are functionally distinct from those giving rise to low-voltage fast (LVF) onset seizures. However, both groups have been associated with hippocampal atrophy (HA), indicating a need to clarify the anatomic correlates of each ictal onset type. We used three-dimensional (3D) hippocampal mapping to quantify HA and determine whether each onset group exhibited a unique distribution of atrophy consistent with the functional differences that distinguish the two onset morphologies.

Mapping cerebellar degeneration in HIV/AIDS.

Progressive brain atrophy in HIV/AIDS is associated with impaired psychomotor performance, perhaps partly reflecting cerebellar degeneration; yet little is known about how HIV/AIDS affects the cerebellum. We visualized the three-dimensional profile of atrophy in 19 HIV-positive patients (age: 42.9+/-8.

Three-dimensional gray matter atrophy mapping in mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer disease.

Background: Alzheimer disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia worldwide. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the recent terminology for patients with cognitive deficiencies in the absence of functional decline. Most patients with MCI harbor the pathologic changes of AD and demonstrate transition to dementia at a rate of 10% to 15% per year.

Three-dimensional mapping of hippocampal anatomy in unmedicated and lithium-treated patients with bipolar disorder.

Declarative memory impairments are common in patients with bipolar illness, suggesting underlying hippocampal pathology. However, hippocampal volume deficits are rarely observed in bipolar disorder. Here we used surface-based anatomic mapping to examine hippocampal anatomy in bipolar patients treated with lithium relative to matched control subjects and unmedicated patients with bipolar disorder.

Joint sulci detection using graphical models and boosted priors.

In this paper we propose an automated approach for joint sulci detection on cortical surfaces by using graphical models and boosting techniques to incorporate shape priors of major sulci and their Markovian relations. For each sulcus, we represent it as a node in the graphical model and associate it with a sample space of candidate curves, which is generated automatically using the Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton of sulcal regions. To take into account individual as well as joint priors about the shape of major sulci, we learn the potential functions of the graphical model using AdaBoost algorithm to select and fuse information from a large set of features.

Structural correlates of apathy in Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Apathy is the most common noncognitive symptom in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The structural correlates of apathy in AD have not yet been described.

Methods: We analyzed magnetic resonance imaging data of 35 AD patients with and without apathy.

3D mapping of language networks in clinical and pre-clinical Alzheimer's disease.

We investigated the associations between Boston naming and the animal fluency tests and cortical atrophy in 19 probable AD and 5 multiple domain amnestic mild cognitive impairment patients who later converted to AD. We applied a surface-based computational anatomy technique to MRI scans of the brain and then used linear regression models to detect associations between animal fluency and Boston Naming Test (BNT) performance and cortical atrophy. The global permutation-corrected significance for the maps associating BNT performance with cortical atrophy was p=.

Automated extraction of the cortical sulci based on a supervised learning approach.

It is important to detect and extract the major cortical sulci from brain images, but manually annotating these sulci is a time-consuming task and requires the labeler to follow complex protocols. This paper proposes a learning-based algorithm for automated extraction of the major cortical sulci from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) volumes and cortical surfaces. Unlike alternative methods for detecting the major cortical sulci, which use a small number of predefined rules based on properties of the cortical surface such as the mean curvature, our approach learns a discriminative model using the probabilistic boosting tree algorithm (PBT).

A learning based algorithm for automatic extraction of the cortical sulci.

This paper presents a learning based method for automatic extraction of the major cortical sulci from MRI volumes or extracted surfaces. Instead of using a few pre-defined rules such as the mean curvature properties, to detect the major sulci, the algorithm learns a discriminative model by selecting and combining features from a large pool of candidates. We used the Probabilistic Boosting Tree algorithm to learn the model, which implicitly discovers and combines rules based on manually annotated sulci traced by neuroanatomists.

Multivariate statistics of the Jacobian matrices in tensor based morphometry and their application to HIV/AIDS.

Tensor-based morphometry (TBM) is widely used in computational anatomy as a means to understand shape variation between structural brain images. A 3D nonlinear registration technique is typically used to align all brain images to a common neuroanatomical template, and the deformation fields are analyzed statistically to identify group differences in anatomy. However, the differences are usually computed solely from the determinants of the Jacobian matrices that are associated with the deformation fields computed by the registration procedure.

Cerebral ventricular changes associated with transitions between normal cognitive function, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia.

Expansion of the cerebral ventricles may occur at an accelerated rate in subjects with dementia, but the time course of expansion during transitions between normal cognitive function, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and dementia is not well understood. Furthermore, the effects of cardiovascular risk factors on rate of ventricular expansion are unclear. We used a fully automated segmentation technique to measure change rate in lateral ventricle-to-brain ratio (VBR) on 145 longitudinal pairs of magnetic resonance images of subjects in the Cardiovascular Health Study Cognition Study from the Pittsburgh Center.