Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of motor activation in the human cervical spinal cord has been attained by detecting blood oxygenization level dependent (BOLD) signal, by T2* weighted fast low angle shot (FLASH) imaging at 1.5 T (1), and similar results at 3.0 T (2). These studies showed ipsilateral response in the spinal cord during hand motion, and are important in order to determine the plausibility of functional mapping in structures of the central nervous system which are difficult to resolve. The objective of this work is to compare previously published results using FLASH-BOLD (1), with our studies using echo planar imaging (EPI) BOLD in the human spinal cord. Functional images from control volunteers were taken during sensorimotor on-off tasks, using a 1.5 T GE Signa LX scanner and T2* weighted EPI-BOLD pulse sequence, in five contiguous axial slices (8mm thick), centered at the cervical region at C6. Functional images were analyzed pixel by pixel with cross-correlation to a box car on...

Multiple brain regions, including parietal and frontal cortical areas, seem to participate in learning and rehearsing associations between spatially defined visual cues and appropriate motor responses. However, because most previous studies have related learning to changes in brain activation according to elapsed time or number of trials but not categories based on performance, it remains unclear how and when areas implicated in learning sensory-motor associations actually participate in the process. The current experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine changes in brain activation when participants learned to associate an arbitrarily located visual cue with a finger movement. Associative trials were categorized as incorrect, first correct, or subsequent correct. Participants also performed a spatially compatible visual-motor control task. A group analysis revealed four major findings addressing the behavioral processes occurring during forming and rehearsing visual-motor rules. First...

Introduction: DTI provides detailed information regarding tissue microstructure. In the developing human brain, significant changes in both size and structure occur in the ventricular zone. These changes are due to the developmentally time-locked events...

Low back pain (LBP) is often reported as dull pain in the deep, musculoskeletal system around the lumbar spine. Although the chronic LBP could potentially involve the supraspinal pathology (1), its cerebral substrates have not been defined. We have deve...

Recovery from ischemic brain damage is affected by many variables that include neuroinflammation. Proinflammatory cytokines such as IL-1 can exacerbate the extent of damage subsequent to ischemia, however, the receptor(s) that mediates its effects remains unclear. To establish whether the IL-1 type 1 receptor (IL-1R1) is necessary for IL-1 to exacerbate brain damage we employed a modified Levine model of H/I on adult mice and used T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at 24 h to assess the initial extent of the hyperintense T2 signal. At 48 h wild type (WT) and IL-1R1 null animals were injected with 2 ng recombinant murine IL-1β into the ventricle of the undamaged hemisphere. MR imaging was repeated at 7 days (after H/I) to evaluate the final volume of ischemic brain damage. At 7 days following H/I, the volume of the hyperintense T2-signal at 7 days in WT animals injected with IL-1β was increased 8% compared to the initial damage volume at 24 h. By contrast, the volume of the hyperintense T2-signal ...

It is well established that healthy aging is associated with regional brain atrophy, which may be exacerbated by an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) with the apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 allele. We have previously reported regionally distribute...

Introduction: Age-related changes in brain plasticity and the effect of age on cognitive performance have been widely studied. It is known that age-related cognitive deficit in humans is influenced by early age experiences, and thus lifestyle factors an...

The hippocampus has been widely studied in neuroimaging research because of its critical role in the pathophysiology of psychiatric illnesses. Both automated and manual segmentation techniques are used to measure hippocampal volumes. Manual segmentation...

Losartan, which is extensively used to treat arterial hypertension, has shown in clinical trials other beneficial properties beyond blood pressure control, among them increased blood vessel formation, or angiogenesis. Increased angiogenesis may play an ...

Patient studies of the hippocampal damage clearly demonstrated that the hippocampus is associated with object-place associative memory. It suggests the importance of the hippocampus in storing multiple information contents in the environment, while its ...