19 Participants with developmental Specific Language Impairment (SLI) were examined by neuropsychological and quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. Measures of intelligence (IQ), language, and memory were obtained, and 3D MRI structural datasets were analysed for bilateral pathology using voxel-based morphometry (VBM). Each participant had been diagnosed with SLI during childhood, and had or was attending a special language unit. The participants ranged in age between 8 and 24 years, and none had any evidence of oro-motor dyspraxia. In addition, each had superior nonverbal compared to verbal IQ, and was impaired on a range of language tests, and on measures of episodic long term memory. To examine the reliability of the VBM findings, two age-matched SLI groups (N=10, & N=9) were formed. Using VBM, comparison of each group to its own control group (matched on age, sex, and nonverbal IQ) showed significant bilateral reductions in grey matter within the cerebellum, particularly around the ...

Cerebral activation in response to contact heat stimulation of the hindpaw was observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments in isoflurane anesthetized rats. Cingulate-, sensory-motor-, and insular cortex, as well as medial and lateral posterior thalamic nuclei, hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray were the most consistently, often bilaterally activated regions. Subcutaneous zymosan injection into one hindpaw led to inflammation and hyperalgesia resulting in activity changes in the namely CNS structures. When the contact heat stimulus was applied after initiating inflammation the hyperalgesia manifested itself as a significant increase of the size of activated areas and/or functional blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal amplitude in the mentioned brain regions. These changes developed over time and are due to peripheral and central sensitization. Our results indicated that processes of sensitization in the cerebrum led to significant increases not only after stimulation of...

It is often implicitly assumed that the neural activation patterns revealed by hemodynamic methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electrophysiological methods, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG), are comparable. In early sensory processing that seems to be the case, but the assumption may not be correct in high-level cognitive tasks. For example, MEG and fMRI literature of single-word reading suggests differences in cortical activation, but direct comparisons are lacking. Here, while the same human participants performed the same reading task, analysis of MEG evoked responses and fMRI blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals revealed marked functional and spatial differences in several cortical areas outside the visual cortex. Divergent patterns of activation were observed in the frontal and temporal cortex, in accordance with previous separate MEG and fMRI studies of reading. Furthermore, opposite stimulus effects in the MEG and fMRI m...

Age is associated with substantial macrostructural brain changes. While some recent magnetic resonance imaging studies have reported larger age effects in men than women, others find no sex differences. As brain morphometry is a potentially important tool in diagnosis and monitoring of age-related neurological diseases, e.g., Alzheimer's disease (AD), it is important to know whether sex influences brain aging. We analyzed cross-sectional magnetic resonance scans from 1143 healthy participants from seven subsamples provided by four independent research groups. In addition, 96 patients with mild AD were included. Estimates of cortical thickness continuously across the brain surface, as well as volume of 17 subcortical structures, were obtained by use of automated segmentation tools (FreeSurfer). In the healthy participants, no differences in aging slopes between women and men were found in any part of the cortex. Pallidum corrected for intracranial volume showed slightly higher age correlations for men. The ...

The problem of anatomical localization is of great importance in brain imaging. Delineating corresponding discrete macro-anatomical regions in individual magnetic resonance images has application to functional imaging research, morphometric analysis, cl...

Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a severe neuropsychiatric illness associated with widespread disruptions across distributed neural systems. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified extensive abnormalities in the blood-oxygen level-dep...

Emotional perception involves reciprocal interactions between subcortical and cortical structures. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is the dominant technique for identifying these structures in humans. Owing to the limited temporal resolutio...

Simultaneous recordings of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide complementary measures of brain function, enabling high spatial and temporal resolution studies of human brain activity. EEG acquired inside...

Chronic alcoholism is associated with changes in brain activity and intrinsic connectivity subserving attention, salience, and executive control function. Most functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have examined brain signal fluctuations ...

In the auditory modality, music and speech have high informational and emotional value for human beings. However, the degree of the functional specialization of the cortical and subcortical areas in encoding music and speech sounds is not yet known. We investigated the functional specialization of the human auditory system in processing music and speech by functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings. During recordings, the subjects were presented with saxophone sounds and pseudowords /ba:ba/ with comparable acoustical content. Our data show that areas encoding music and speech sounds differ in the temporal and frontal lobes. Moreover, slight variations in sound pitch and duration activated thalamic structures differentially. However, this was the case with speech sounds only while no such effect was evidenced with music sounds. Thus, our data reveal the existence of a functional specialization of the human brain in accurately representing sound information at both cortical and subcortical areas. They ...