Individualized temporal patterns drive human sleep spindle timing.

Sleep spindles are cortical electrical oscillations considered critical for memory consolidation and sleep stability. The timing and pattern of sleep spindles are likely to be important in driving synaptic plasticity during sleep as well as preventing disruption of sleep by sensory and internal stimuli. However, the relative importance of factors such as sleep depth, cortical up/down-state, and temporal clustering in governing sleep spindle dynamics remains poorly understood.

Integrating Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and motion analysis for emerging precision medicine applications in Parkinson's Disease.

One of the key challenges in Big Data for clinical research and healthcare is how to integrate new sources of data, whose relation to disease processes are often not well understood, with multiple classical clinical measurements that have been used by clinicians for years to describe disease processes and interpret therapeutic outcomes. Without such integration, even the most promising data from emerging technologies may have limited, if any, clinical utility. This paper presents an approach to address this challenge, illustrated through an example in Parkinson's Disease (PD) management.

Closed-loop modulation of remote hippocampal representations with neurofeedback.

Humans can remember specific remote events without acting on them and influence which memories are retrieved based on internal goals. However, animal models typically present sensory cues to trigger memory retrieval and then assess retrieval based on action. Thus, it is difficult to determine whether measured neural activity patterns relate to the cue(s), the memory, or the behavior.

Thalamic epileptic spikes disrupt sleep spindles in patients with epileptic encephalopathy.

In severe epileptic encephalopathies, epileptic activity contributes to progressive cognitive dysfunction. Epileptic encephalopathies share the trait of spike-wave activation during non-REM sleep (EE-SWAS), a sleep stage dominated by sleep spindles, which are brain oscillations known to coordinate offline memory consolidation. Epileptic activity has been proposed to hijack the circuits driving these thalamocortical oscillations, thereby contributing to cognitive impairment.