Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging
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Neuromuscular ultrasound of the cranial nerves is an emerging field which may help in the assessment of cranial neuropathies. The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of neuromuscular ultrasound in Bell's palsy. A second objective was to assess the possibility of any associated vagus nerve abnormality. ⋯ Ultrasound can detect facial nerve enlargement in Bell's palsy and may have a role in assessment, or follow-up, of Bell's palsy and other facial nerve disorders. The low sensitivity of the current technique precludes its routine use for diagnosis, however, this study demonstrates its validity and potential for future research.
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Decision-making systems trained on structural magnetic resonance imaging data of subjects affected by the Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls (CTRL) are becoming widespread prognostic tools for subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study compares the performances of three classification methods based on support vector machines (SVMs), using as initial sets of brain voxels (ie, features): (1) the segmented grey matter (GM); (2) regions of interest (ROIs) by voxel-wise t-test filtering; (3) parceled ROIs, according to prior knowledge. ⋯ The classification performance, evaluated as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), reaches AUC = (88.9 ± .5)% in 20-fold cross-validation on the AD/CTRL dataset, when the GM is classified as a whole. The highest discrimination accuracy between MCI converters and nonconverters is achieved when the SVM-RFE is applied to the whole GM: with AUC reaching (70.7 ± .9)%, it outperforms both ROI-based approaches in predicting the AD conversion.
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Case Reports
Onyx-HD 500 Embolization of a Traumatic Internal Carotid Artery Pseudoaneurysm after Transsphenoidal Surgery.
Traumatic intracranial pseudoaneurysms present a challenge for treatment. Traditionally these lesions have required a deconstructive approach consisting of vessel sacrifice since their fragile nature often makes direct microsurgical repair or coil embolization hazardous. As a high-viscosity liquid embolic agent that results in immediate, vessel sparing aneurysm occlusion, Onyx-HD 500 represents a uniquely efficacious tool for this clinical situation. ⋯ This case illustrates the utility of a high-viscosity liquid embolic agent in providing immediate protection from rehemorrhage by occluding a large ruptured pseudoaneurysm of the proximal intracranial ICA, while sparing the parent artery.
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Clinical Trial
Susceptibility-Weighted Phase Imaging and Oxygen Extraction Fraction Measurement during Sedation and Sedation Recovery using 7T MRI.
In this work, we demonstrate oxygen extraction fraction (OEF) measurement using 7T MRI with susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI), in sedated and nonsedated adults. ⋯ Significant change in ΔOEF during conscious sedation using midazolam and propofol could be measured using SWI at 7T in vivo. This may be a potentially useful approach for the noninvasive assessment of OEF in the brain on a clinical basis.
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Requests for after-hours emergent spine MR imaging seem to be increasing. We sought to review the trend in after hours spine MRI utilization at our institution and to determine how these results impacted therapeutic intervention. ⋯ Clinical use of emergent after hours spine MRI is steadily increasing at our institution. While MR imaging often discerned significant pathologies, performing these emergent studies rarely resulted in immediate surgical or radiotherapeutic intervention.