Diagnosis of regional cerebral blood flow abnormalities using spect: agreement between individualized statistical parametric maps and visual inspection by nuclear medicine physicians with different levels of expertise in nuclear neurology.

Introduction: Visual analysis is widely used to interpret regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) SPECT images in clinical practice despite its limitations. Automated methods are employed to investigate between-group rCBF differences in research studies but have rarely been explored in individual analyses.

Objectives: To compare visual inspection by nuclear physicians with the automated statistical parametric mapping program using a SPECT dataset of patients with neurological disorders and normal control images.

Hyperventilation revisited: physiological effects and efficacy on focal seizure activation in the era of video-EEG monitoring.

Purpose: Hyperventilation is an activation method that provokes physiological slowing of brain rhythms, interictal discharges, and seizures, especially in generalized idiopathic epilepsies. In this study we assessed its effectiveness in inducing focal seizures during video-EEG monitoring.

Methods: We analyzed the effects of hyperventilation (HV) during video-EEG monitoring (video-EEG) of patients with medically intractable focal epilepsies.