Novel Diagnostic Imaging Approach for Patients With Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection: The Utility of 18 F-FDG PET Imaging.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD) is an underdiagnosed etiology of acute coronary syndrome in women. Accurate diagnosis remains challenging but is imperative for treatment and prevention. We show here the utility of 18 F-FDG PET imaging in SCAD diagnosis.

The Ophthalmology Mini-Elective Gives Vision to Preclinical Medical Students.

Introduction: Ophthalmology education during medical school is often very limited. To provide exposure to areas beyond its standard curriculum, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine offers mini-elective courses in various disciplines. We developed such a course to provide instruction in the basics of clinical ophthalmology to interested preclinical medical students.

Proteus mirabilis Keratitis: Risk Factors, Clinical Features, Treatment Outcomes, and Microbiological Characteristics.

Purpose: To characterize the risk factors, clinical presentations, management choices, and outcomes of Proteus mirabilis keratitis.

Methods: In this retrospective study, 26 culture-proven cases of P. mirabilis infections were diagnosed and treated between 1998 and 2019 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The Fusiform and Occipital Face Areas Can Process a Nonface Category Equivalently to Faces.

The fusiform and occipital face areas (FFA and OFA) are functionally defined brain regions in human ventral occipitotemporal cortex associated with face perception. There is an ongoing debate, however, whether these regions are face-specific or whether they also facilitate the perception of nonface object categories. Here, we present evidence that, under certain conditions, bilateral FFA and OFA respond to a nonface category equivalently to faces.

A Normalization Framework for Emotional Attention.

The normalization model of attention proposes that attention can affect performance by response- or contrast-gain changes, depending on the size of the stimulus and attention field. Here, we manipulated the attention field by emotional valence, negative faces versus positive faces, while holding stimulus size constant in a spatial cueing task. We observed changes in the cueing effect consonant with changes in response gain for negative faces and contrast gain for positive faces.

Spatial Mechanisms within the Dorsal Visual Pathway Contribute to the Configural Processing of Faces.

Human face recognition is often attributed to configural processing; namely, processing the spatial relationships among the features of a face. If configural processing depends on fine-grained spatial information, do visuospatial mechanisms within the dorsal visual pathway contribute to this process? We explored this question in human adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in a same-different face detection task. Within localized, spatial-processing regions of the posterior parietal cortex, configural face differences led to significantly stronger activation compared to featural face differences, and the magnitude of this activation correlated with behavioral performance.

Retinal Structures and Visual Cortex Activity are Impaired Prior to Clinical Vision Loss in Glaucoma.

Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide and its pathogenesis remains unclear. In this study, we measured the structure, metabolism and function of the visual system by optical coherence tomography and multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging in healthy subjects and glaucoma patients with different degrees of vision loss. We found that inner retinal layer thinning, optic nerve cupping and reduced visual cortex activity occurred before patients showed visual field impairment.

Common Dorsal Stream Substrates for the Mapping of Surface Texture to Object Parts and Visual Spatial Processing.

Everyday objects are often composed of multiple parts, each with a unique surface texture. The neural substrates mediating the integration of surface features on different object parts are not fully understood, and potential contributions by both the ventral and dorsal visual pathways are possible. To explore these substrates, we collected fMRI data while human participants performed a difference detection task on two objects with textured parts.