Resolution dependence of vessel size index across various brain regions.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) excels at detecting quantitative changes in microvascular parameters such as cerebral blood volume, cerebral blood flow, and vessel size index (VSI), which are essential for diagnosing and monitoring cerebrovascular diseases. Absolute VSI estimation, often utilizing superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles as contrast agents, relies on measuring transverse relaxation rates (∆R and ∆R). This study systematically investigates the spatial resolution dependence of VSI using Monte Carlo simulations and in vivo rat brain MRI experiments.

An update of the severe trauma scoring system using the Korean National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS) database.

Background: Various scoring systems are utilized to assess severe trauma patients, with one of the most commonly used tools being the International Classification of Diseases Injury Severity Score (ICISS) criteria derived from the Survival Risk Ratio (SRR) calculated using diagnostic codes. This study aimed to redefine the severe trauma scoring system in Korea based on the SRR for diagnostic codes, and subsequently evaluate its performance in predicting survival outcomes for trauma patients.

Methods: This study included trauma patients who visited Level 1 and 2 emergency departments (EDs) between January 2016 and December 2019, utilizing the Korean National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS) database.

A day in the life: Couples' everyday communication and subsequent relationship outcomes.

Understanding how communication processes contribute to well-functioning versus distressed couple relationships has relied largely on brief, laboratory-based conversations. Harnessing technological advancements, the present study extends the literature by capturing couples' naturalistic communication over one full day at Time 1 (T1). This study tested associations between data-driven categories of couple communication behaviors and relationship outcomes (i.

Epidemiologic trends of patients who visited nationwide emergency departments: a report from the National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS) of Korea, 2018-2022.

Objective: : This study analyzed trends in emergency department (ED) visits in South Korea using the National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS) data from 2018 to 2022.

Methods: : This was a retrospective observational study using data from the NEDIS database from 2018 to 2022. Age- and sex-standardized ED visits per 100,000 population, as well as age- and sex-standardized rates for mortality, admission, and transfer, were calculated.

Empirical relationship between TEM-derived myelin volume fraction and MRI-R values in aging ex vivo rat corpus callosum.

Ex vivo ratiometric measurements of short- and long-T components using the multiple spin echo sequence of MRI are often employed to evaluate alterations in myelin content in the white matter (WM) of the brain. However, the relationship between absolute MRI-T values (long-T component) and myelin volumetric information in aged ex vivo rodent WM appears to be influenced by factors such as animal species, field strength, and fixation durations/washing. Here, multiple spin echo sequence-based MRI-R (the reciprocal of T) values were measured in the corpus callosum (CC) region in the post-mortem rat brains (n = 9) of different age groups with common fixation techniques without washing at 7 T.

Correspondence between development of cytotoxic edema and cerebrospinal fluid volume and flow in the third ventricle after ischemic stroke.

Objectives: The importance of monitoring cerebrospinal fluid for the development of edema in ischemic stroke has been emphasized; however, studies on the relationship between intraventricular cerebrospinal fluid behavior and edema through longitudinal observations and analysis are rare. This study aimed to investigate the correlation between the development of cytotoxic edema and cerebrospinal fluid volume and flow in the third ventricle after ischemic stroke.

Materials And Methods: The ventricle and edema regions were obtained using apparent diffusion coefficients and T and subdivided into lateral/ventral 3rd ventricles and cytotoxic/vasogenic (or cyst) edema, respectively.

Adaptation of family-based treatment within an inpatient medical stabilization program for children with eating disorders.

Objective: Eating disorders are serious psychiatric conditions predominantly affecting children, adolescents, and young adults. While family-based treatment (FBT) is the gold standard outpatient treatment approach for adolescents with restrictive eating disorders, there is not a universally recognized best practice within higher levels of care. There is a particular dearth of literature detailing recommended psychological and behavioral interventions in the inpatient medical setting.

Relationship satisfaction, feelings of closeness and annoyance, and linkage in electrodermal activity.

Physiological linkage refers to moment-to-moment, time-linked coordination in physiological responses among people in close relationships. Although people in romantic relationships have been shown to evidence linkage in their physiological responses over time, it is still unclear how patterns of covariation relate to in-the-moment, as well as general levels of, relationship functioning. In the present study with data collected between 2014 and 2017, we capture linkage in electrodermal activity (EDA) in a diverse sample of young-adult couples, generally representative and generalizable to the Los Angeles community from which we sampled.

Improved laminar specificity and sensitivity by combining SE and GE BOLD signals.

The most widely used gradient-echo (GE) blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast has high sensitivity, but low specificity due to draining vein contributions, while spin-echo (SE) BOLD approach at ultra-high magnetic fields is highly specific to neural active sites but has lower sensitivity. To obtain high specificity and sensitivity, we propose to utilize a vessel-size-sensitive filter to the GE-BOLD signal, which suppresses macrovascular contributions and to combine selectively retained microvascular GE-BOLD signals with the SE-BOLD signals. To investigate our proposed idea, fMRI with 0.

What happens when romantic couples discuss personal loss? Relational, emotional, and physiological impacts.

Does talking about loss with a romantic partner have salutary personal and relationship effects? Prior evidence reveals the benefits of emotional disclosure in couple relationships, yet disclosure about loss has been overlooked in research on couple communication. Using a novel communication paradigm with young-adult heterosexual romantic partners ( = 114 couples), we investigated emotions, physiological arousal (skin conductance responses [SCR]), and relationship closeness when narrating a personal loss and listening to the partner's loss, and compared these loss discussions to discussions about desired relationship changes. Based on partners' self-reports, narrating loss elicited more vulnerable and, unexpectedly, more antagonistic emotions.

The impact of COVID-19 on the patterns of emergency department visits among pediatric patients.

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the patterns of pediatric patients visiting emergency departments (EDs) before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate the interactive effect between the COVID-19 outbreak and age groups.

Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study using the nationwide emergency patient database in Korea from January 2019 to December 2020. Pediatric patients (≤18 years) who visited all 402 nationwide EDs were included.

from diffusion MRI reveals a correspondence between ventricular cerebrospinal fluid volume and flow in the ischemic rodent model.

Quantitative measurement of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow and volume and longitudinal monitoring of CSF dynamics provide insights into the compensatory characteristics of post-stroke CSF. In this study, we compared the MRI pseudo-diffusion index () of live and sacrificed rat brains to confirm the effect of ventricular CSF flow on diffusion signals. We observed the relationship between the CSF peak velocities and through Monte Carlo (MC) simulations to further understand the source of contrast.

Improvement of sensitivity and specificity for laminar BOLD fMRI with double spin-echo EPI in humans at 7 T.

Mapping mesoscopic cortical functional units such as columns or laminae is increasingly pursued by ultra-high field (UHF) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The most popular approach for high-resolution fMRI is currently gradient-echo (GE) blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI. However, its spatial accuracy is reduced due to its sensitivity to draining vessels, including pial veins, whereas spin-echo (SE) BOLD signal is expected to have higher spatial accuracy, albeit with lower sensitivity than the GE-BOLD signal.

Fluctuations in pronoun use in everyday life: Understanding couple aggression in context.

Everyday language use, including the pronouns people choose when speaking to romantic partners, may reflect underlying aspects of relationship functioning and may have important implications for understanding couple conflict and dating aggression more generally. The current study measured couples' hour-to-hour "we," "I," and "you" speech in daily life and examined symmetry in pronoun use, or the extent to which partners mirror each other in the frequency of the pronouns they use. First, we examined associations between symmetry in pronoun use and overall levels of dating aggression.

A multi-inversion multi-echo spin and gradient echo echo planar imaging sequence with low image distortion for rapid quantitative parameter mapping and synthetic image contrasts.

Purpose: Brain imaging exams typically take 10-20 min and involve multiple sequential acquisitions. A low-distortion whole-brain echo planar imaging (EPI)-based approach was developed to efficiently encode multiple contrasts in one acquisition, allowing for calculation of quantitative parameter maps and synthetic contrast-weighted images.

Methods: Inversion prepared spin- and gradient-echo EPI was developed with slice-order shuffling across measurements for efficient acquisition with T , T , and weighting.

Romantic partner presence and physiological responses in daily life: Attachment style as a moderator.

The present study investigated whether the presence of a romantic partner in daily life is associated with attenuated sympathetic nervous system responses. Additionally, romantic attachment style was tested as a moderator. For one day, 106 heterosexual young adult dating couples wore ambulatory sensors that monitored electrodermal activity (EDA) - an index of sympathetic arousal.

A Systematic Review of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia in Romantic Relationships.

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of the parasympathetic nervous system, has recently gained attention as a physiological component of regulatory processes, social connectedness, and health. Within the context of romantic relationships, studies have operationalized and conceptualized RSA in disparate ways, obscuring a clear pattern of findings. This systematic review synthesizes the rapidly developing literature and clarifies the role of RSA in romantic relationships.

Layer-dependent functional connectivity methods.

Recent methodological advances in fMRI contrast and readout strategies have allowed researchers to approach the mesoscopic spatial regime of cortical layers. This has revolutionized the ability to map cortical information processing within and across brain systems. However, until recently, most layer-fMRI studies have been confined to primary cortices using basic block-design tasks and macro-vascular-contaminated sequence contrasts.

Serial optical coherence microscopy for label-free volumetric histopathology.

The observation of histopathology using optical microscope is an essential procedure for examination of tissue biopsies or surgically excised specimens in biological and clinical laboratories. However, slide-based microscopic pathology is not suitable for visualizing the large-scale tissue and native 3D organ structure due to its sampling limitation and shallow imaging depth. Here, we demonstrate serial optical coherence microscopy (SOCM) technique that offers label-free, high-throughput, and large-volume imaging of ex vivo mouse organs.

A Matter of the Heart: Daytime Relationship Functioning and Overnight Heart Rate in Young Dating Couples.

Background: Although past longitudinal research demonstrates that romantic partners affect one another's health outcomes, considerably less is known about how romantic experiences "get under the skin" in everyday life.

Purpose: The current study investigated whether young couples' naturally occurring feelings of closeness to and annoyance with each other during waking hours were associated with their overnight cardiovascular activity.

Methods: Participants were 63 heterosexual young adult dating couples (Mage = 23.

Pattern recognition analysis of directional intravoxel incoherent motion MRI in ischemic rodent brains.

This study aimed to demonstrate a reliable automatic segmentation method for independently separating reduced diffusion and decreased perfusion areas in ischemic stroke brains using constrained nonnegative matrix factorization (cNMF) pattern recognition in directional intravoxel incoherent motion MRI (IVIM-MRI). First, the feasibility of cNMF-based segmentation of IVIM signals was investigated in both simulations and in vivo experiments. The cNMF analysis was independently performed for S -normalized and scaled (by the difference between the maximum and minimum) IVIM signals, respectively.

Blood Oxygen Level-Dependent MRI of the Myocardium with Multiecho Gradient-Echo Spin-Echo Imaging.

Background Myocardial oxygenation imaging could help determine the presence of microvascular dysfunction associated with increased cardiovascular risk. However, it is challenging to depict the potentially small oxygenation alterations with current noninvasive cardiac MRI blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) techniques. Purpose To demonstrate the cardiac application of a gradient-echo spin-echo (GESE) echo-planar imaging sequence for dynamic and quantitative heartbeat-to-heartbeat BOLD MRI and evaluate the sequence in populations both healthy and with hypertension in combination with a breath hold-induced CO intervention.

Accelerated spin-echo functional MRI using multisection excitation by simultaneous spin-echo interleaving (MESSI) with complex-encoded generalized slice dithered enhanced resolution (cgSlider) simultaneous multislice echo-planar imaging.

Purpose: Spin-echo functional MRI (SE-fMRI) has the potential to improve spatial specificity when compared with gradient-echo fMRI. However, high spatiotemporal resolution SE-fMRI with large slice-coverage is challenging as SE-fMRI requires a long echo time to generate blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast, leading to long repetition times. The aim of this work is to develop an acquisition method that enhances the slice-coverage of SE-fMRI at high spatiotemporal resolution.

Pattern recognition analysis of dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC)-MRI curves automatically segments tissue areas with intact blood-brain barrier in a rat stroke model: A feasibility and comparison study.

Background: The manual segmentation of intact blood-brain barrier (BBB) regions in the stroke brain is cumbersome, due to the coexistence of infarction, large blood vessels, ventricles, and intact BBB regions, specifically in areas with weak signal enhancement following contrast agent injection.

Hypothesis: That from dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC)-MRI alone, without user intervention, regions of weak BBB damage can be segmented based on the leakage-related parameter K and the extent of intact BBB regions, needed to estimate K values, determined.

Study Type: Feasibility.

Accelerated whole-brain perfusion imaging using a simultaneous multislice spin-echo and gradient-echo sequence with joint virtual coil reconstruction.

Purpose: Dynamic susceptibility contrast imaging requires high temporal sampling, which poses limits on achievable spatial coverage and resolution. Additionally, more encoding-intensive multi-echo acquisitions for quantitative imaging are desired to mitigate contrast leakage effects, which further limits spatial encoding. We present an accelerated sequence that provides whole-brain coverage at an improved spatio-temporal resolution, to allow for dynamic quantitative R and R * mapping during contrast-enhanced imaging.