Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, includes the features of decline in memory impairment and other cognitive domains as well as prominent hippocampal atrophy. Although there is no disease modifying medication for AD yet, choline...

Objective: Stroke represents one of the leading causes of adult disability and recovery is highly challenging for most survivors. Early restorative therapies like appropriate physical exercise are shown to improve the outcome in motor function. It is be...

Neuroimaging and post-mortem studies have demonstrated an association between late-life depression and volume reduction in specific areas of the brain, particularly in the frontal lobes. While evidence on the effect of subthreshold depressive symptoms o...

The presence of fluid in the brain ventricles has been known since the ancient Egyptians. However, the first mention of CSF circulation did not occur until 1532, when the Italian anatomist Niccolò Massa first described the movement of a “watery excess” through brain foramina ([Herbowski, 2013][

In the perinatal period, human brain growth is most rapid and the parameters of growth are greatly sensitive to deleterious influences upon brain development. Standard MRI-based morphometric techniques are of limited application at this age because the perinatal brain is minimally myelinated and lack the marked differences in tissue contrast upon which standard approaches depend. The goal of the present study is to develop an accurate, reliable and reproducible method for segmentation and volumetric analysis of the minimally myelinated brains in the range of 34 to 42 weeks gestational age. The emphasis is placed upon the forebrain where highly reliable criteria allow segmentation of the external contour, the separate boundaries of the hippocampus and amygdala and en bloc basal nuclear structures including caudate, diencephalon, striatum and pallidum. It is intended that a series of perinatal brains segmented in terms of these boundaries will serve as a training set for the automated segmentation algorithm,...

We previously reported that manual acupuncuture results in biphasic activation of specific CNS regions. In the present study we employed a continuous 25 min Electro-Acupuncture (EA) stimulation to examine the brain responses associated with attaining acupuncture-induced analgesia. Ten subjects were studied,all signed our institution’s human subject protection (IRB) form. The study consisted of three conditions: EA acupuncture of two analgesia-related acupoints (LI-4, St-36), EA of a sham acupoint, and no stimulation. EA (2Hz) was applied for 25 minutes. Analgesia was assessed by determining a heat pain threshold for each subject before and after the test situations. Brain imaging was done on a Siemens 3T head only (Allegra) scanner with a standard bird-cage coil. Images were taken every 5 minutes. Data was analyzed using SPM99 and AFNI.We measured changes in activation volume for the 25 min and at each 5min step. FFT was used to determine changes in oscillation frequency and/or amplitude. The following reg...

Explicit and implicit knowledge represent two different types of memory with distinct neural substrates. A key question in the field of memory concerns whether explicit and implicit representations of knowledge are acquired using distinct, overlapping, or partially overlapping networks of brain areas. In the Serial Reaction Time (SRT) task participants learn a sequence of target locations by making button-press responses to cues that follow a repeating sequence. The sequential information can be learned implicitly through practice or can be learned explicitly by memorization. The neural correlates of SRT after these two types of learning were compared in separate groups. The implicit group performed 240 trials of practice without being informed about the repeating sequence. The explicit group memorized the sequence (see Reber et al. 1998, J. Cog Neuro). After training, subjects performed the SRT task during fMRI (3T, TR=2.4, TE=25ms, 44 x 3mm slices) under three intermixed conditions: in response to the tr...

The asymmetry of the human brain has been widely studied in the neuroscience field. It is well known that the left hemisphere is specialized for language and handedness and the right hemisphere is dominant for some nonverbal functions such as spatial at...

Objective. The cerebral metabolic rate of oxygen (CMRO2) is an essential parameter for evaluating brain function and pathophysiology. Measurements of CMRO2 with high spatio-temporal resolution are critically important for understanding how the brain cop...

Modularity is a fundamental principle of whole-brain organization, supporting functional specialization and robustness to change. These two properties are widely believed to be fundamental to learning, which is supported by multiple memory systems and i...