Touch and brush sensory stimuli elicit activity in discriminative touch pathways involving specific regions in the spinal cord and brainstem. In order to study sensory mechanisms and to detect changes with altered sensation such as neuropathic pain, it ...

The human sense of smell plays an important role in appetite and food intake, detecting environmental threats, social interactions, and memory processing. However, little is known about the neural circuity supporting its function. The olfactory tracts project from the olfactory bulb along the base of the frontal cortex, branching into several striae to meet diverse cortical regions. Historically, using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) to reconstruct the human olfactory tracts has been prevented by susceptibility and motion artifacts. Here, we used a dMRI method with readout segmentation of long variable echo-trains (RESOLVE) to minimize image distortions and characterize the human olfactory tracts in vivo . We collected high-resolution dMRI data from 25 healthy human participants (12 male and 13 female) and performed probabilistic tractography using constrained spherical deconvolution. At the individual subject level, we identified the lateral, medial, and intermediate striae with their respecti...

Purpose: We evaluated the accuracy and precision of diffusion tensor tracking (DTT) using simulations, and applied DTT to study visual pathways in living humans. Methods: For simulations, synthetic diffusion-tensor MRI (DT-MRI) images were computed for a curved pathway and fed into the DTT procedure (1) after adding noise. Errors between simulated and ideal tracks were computed under various conditions. Human DTT experiments were performed using custom single-shot echo-planar DT-MRI. Tracks were computed from a whole-brain array of seed points (1), and pathways were obtained using a selection procedure based on anatomical or functional MRI (1). We obtained trans-commissural and geniculocalcarine tracts (GCTs), ventral (occipital-temporal) pathways, and U-fibers. Results: Typical accuracy and precision was < 1mm from simulation, consistent with experimental results (Figure). The tracked GCT, including Meyer's loop, connected the lateral geniculate nucleus with striate cortex. The trans-commissural pathwa...

Background: A key limiting factor for the clinical application of gene therapy in spinal cord disorders is the low levels of transduction that current vectors can achieve in the motor neurons (MN) of spinal cord. We have addressed this issue with a modi...

OBJECTIVE: Pain Scrambler therapy is a patient-specific electrocutaneous nerve stimulation device. Post burn neuropathic pain is often difficult to treat effectively. The neuropathic pain may result from injury to sensory nerves that hampers conductance...

The world’s population is ageing. Population ageing is poised to become one of the most significant social transformations of the twenty-first century. a variety of insults In the present study we evaluated the effect of the same ultra-low dose of THC o...

To date, most studies have focused on the impact of zika virus (ZIKV) infection in utero, documenting its association with microcephaly, fetal brain lesions, and other serious birth defects. Considering the impact that ZIKV infection can have on the dev...

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), a clear colorless fluid, is one of the two discrete fluid compartments of the brain along with interstitial fluid (ISF). CSF, together with ISF, plays a key role for the removal of solutes and metabolic wastes from the brain i...

Smaller hippocampal volume predicts improvements in posttraumatic stress symptoms in pediatric cancer patients following a novel martial arts-based intervention Authors: Zazai Owens, Allesandra Iadipaolo, Craig Peters, Cindy Cohen, Elimelech Goldberg, M...

The ability to control the threats we encounter has important implications for resilience to stress. Chronic stress exposure can lead to emotional dysfunction and the development of anxiety disorders. Therefore, examining anticipatory neural responses t...