Purpose: Wistar NIN obese (WNIN/Ob) rats developed at the National Institute of Nutrition are the heaviest inbred rat strain in the world. These rats are hyperphagic, hyperinsulinemic, hyperleptinemic and have reduced longevity (an average lifespan of 1...

It is well-established that both anatomical and functional features of the human brain develop from childhood to adulthood. However, the development of functional regions relative to large-scale and fine-scale white matter anatomical properties is poorl...

Brain edema is the fatal complications of the ischemic stroke. The leading cause of brain edema is considered as the extravasation of fluid into the cerebral parenchyma induced by disruption of the blood-brain barrier. Recently, increasing evidence show...

Bioluminescence tomography (BLT) is a powerful non-invasive molecular imaging tool for in vivo studies of glioma in mice. However, because of the light scattering and resulted ill-posed problems, it is challenging to develop a sufficient reconstruction ...

Intrastriatal implantation of human retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells attached to gelatin microcarriers (GM) produces long-term motor improvement in humans with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Sustained activity has also been demonstrated in both rodent and monkey models of PD with post-mortem histological evidence of microcarrier-attached RPE cells. Recently, cell labeling methods have been described that allow the in vivo follow-up of implanted cells through non-invasive imaging methods such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We describe here the safety and efficacy of labeling RPE cells with dextran-coated superparamagnetic iron oxide (SPIO) nanoparticles for future in vivo MR imaging. Feridex I.V. (a ferumoxide solution composed of a dextran coated SPIO nanoparticle suspension), in combination with the transfection agent protamine sulfate (Pro), is used as a pre-labeling agent that is taken up by RPE cells in vitro. Using an immortalized, commercial RPE cell-line (RPE-19), SPIO-labeled RPE-19 cells we...

It has been hypothesized that the auditory system is hierarchically organized, with the primary auditory cortex (AI) encoding the stimulus in the most direct fashion, and upper levels in the hierarchy extracting more complex features of the stimulus. Blood-oxygenation level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the functional organization of the cortical response to various complex, non-speech stimuli, including pure tones, band-passed noise, and upward and downward frequency modulated (FM) sweeps. 15 right-handed normal volunteers performed a one-back task while attending to binaurally presented 30s blocks of the four stimuli classes, each block consisting of stimuli of differing frequencies from the same class. Statistical maps measuring the association between hemodynamic response and stimulus class were made for each subject and combined in stereotaxic space. Bandpass noise showed greater activation than FM sweeps in right auditory cortex and inferior frontal gyrus. Th...

Erratum: In the December 1, 1996 issue, a transcription error resulted in incorrect first names being published in the article by Porro et al. (pp. 7688–7698). The correct first names for Drs. Cettolo and Zuiani should be Valentina and Chiara, respectively

The main problem of traumatic spinal cord injury TSCI lies in its complexity, as their pathophysiology involves mechanical damage both the primary and secondary mechanical damage. It currently do not have any effective treatment to restore neurological ...

Introduction: Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), sometimes referred to as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is a debilitating illness with a variety of presenting features. Unrefreshing sleep is one of commonly observed features in CFS patients. However, the...

The broad heterogeneity of spinal cord injury (SCI) complicates patient assessment when determining urgent care, transportation needs and outcome prediction, requiring objective and sensitive techniques for rapid diagnosis. Biofluids offer a protein sig...