There is great interest in using biomarkers to predict who will develop Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Studies have used a variety of imaging modalities to investigate individuals with mild cognitive impairment and genetic risks as models of preclinical disease. In this study, we used positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect metabolic and structural changes that predict cognitive decline in asymptomatic elderly people (> 60 yrs). Participants in this study were drawn from a subset of the Sacramento Area Latino Study of Aging (SALSA), N=61. These participants received MRI and PET and were neither demented nor cognitively impaired at baseline. The modified mini mental state examination (3MSE) and delayed recall (DelRec) examination were administered at approximate yearly intervals for an average follow up of 3.8 years. Rate of change in 3MSE/year and DelRec/year was correlated with baseline PET data and MR-measured volumes of entorhinal cortex and hippocampus. Baseline PET...

Patient-clinician interactions can shape patients’ clinical outcomes such as pain relief, but the underlying brain mechanisms are unknown. We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to simultaneously record brain activity in patient-clinician ...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) are widely used methods for studying the neurophysiological basis of episodic memory. The aim of the current study was to clarify the relationship between hemody...

Obesity is a worldwide epidemic with few alternative treatment methods, but electroacupuncture (EA) is effective in managing it. We compared acute effects during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) between overweight/obese patient...

We studied the effect of selective attention on audio-visual temporal coherence using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human primary auditory cortex (PAC). We first characterized subjects’ tonotopic and retinotopic organization by measuri...

Previous magnetic resonance imaging studies found changes in the brain diffusivity after chronic alcohol intake. However, the results are not consistent and the connection between alterations of brain diffusion properties and microstructural changes of ...

Neither blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activation nor resting state magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) signals in white matter have been well-established. However, growing evidence suggests reliable detection of white matter BOLD signals may ...

This study examined the effects of rehearsal on the neural substrates supporting episodic autobiographical and semantic memory. Stimuli were collected prospectively using audio recordings, thereby bringing under experimental control ecologically valid, naturalistic autobiographical stimuli. Participants documented both autobiographical and semantic stimuli over a period of 6–8 months, followed by a rehearsal manipulation during the 3 d preceding scanning. During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, participants were exposed to recordings that they were hearing for the first, second, or eighth time. Rehearsal increased the rated vividness with which information was remembered, particularly for autobiographical events. Neuroimaging findings revealed rehearsal-related suppression of activation in regions supporting episodic autobiographical and semantic memory. Episodic autobiographical and semantic memory produced distinctly different patterns of regional activation that held even after eight repe...

Circadian rhythm is important in determining sleep-wake cycle and suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) plays a major role as a pacemaker in the brain. Recently, in the resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI), several functional network hav...

Fetal grafts show little migration after transplantation into the lesioned brain, whereas transplanted stem cells will migrate from the contralateral hemisphere to a focal ischaemic lesion. To track the migration of grafted cells, conditionally immortalized neural stem cells from the MHP36 cell line were labelled in vitro with the bifunctional contrast agent GRID which can be detected by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fluorescent microscopy. Following 60 minutes of middle cerebral artery occlusion or sham surgery, rat brains were imaged by T1-, T2-, and proton density-weighted MRI in a 4.7T Varian imaging system to obtain pre-grafting coronal images of the stroke lesion. All animals were then transplanted contralaterally with 100,000 labelled stem cells in two deposits. The in vivo migration of grafted stem cells was assessed by scanning both transplanted ischaemic and control rats at 1, 7, and 14 days post-grafting. Fluorescent microscopy validated our in vivo images and indicated that some cells mi...