NeuroImage
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Confounding noise in BOLD fMRI data arises primarily from fluctuations in blood flow and oxygenation due to cardiac and respiratory effects, spontaneous low frequency oscillations (LFO) in arterial pressure, and non-task related neural activity. Cardiac noise is particularly problematic, as the low sampling frequency of BOLD fMRI ensures that these effects are aliased in recorded data. Various methods have been proposed to estimate the noise signal through measurement and transformation of the cardiac and respiratory waveforms (e.g. ⋯ By comparison, the nine RETROICOR+RVT regressors together explain a median of 6.8% of the variance in the BOLD data. Detection of resting state networks was enhanced with NIRS denoising, and there were no appreciable differences in the bias of the different techniques. Physiological noise regressors generated using Regressor Interpolation at Progressive Time Delays (RIPTiDe) offer an effective method for efficiently removing hemodynamic noise from BOLD data.
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It has traditionally been held that the hippocampus is not part of the neural substrate of working memory (WM), and that WM is preserved in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE). Recent imaging and neuropsychological data suggest this view may need revision. The aim of this study was to investigate the neural correlates of WM in TLE using functional MRI (fMRI). ⋯ Our results suggest that WM is impaired in unilateral HS and the underlying neural correlates of WM are disrupted. Our findings suggest that hippocampal activity is progressively suppressed as the WM load increases, with maintenance of good performance. Implications for understanding the role of the hippocampus in WM are discussed.
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Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEIs), such as donepezil, have been shown to improve cognition in mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. In this paper, our goal is to determine the relationship between altered cerebral blood flow (CBF) and intrinsic functional network connectivity changes in mild AD patients before and after 12-week donepezil treatment. An integrative neuroimaging approach was employed by combining pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling (pCASL) MRI and resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) methods to determine the changes in CBF and functional connectivity (FC) in the cholinergic pathway. ⋯ Finally, the FC changes in the medial prefrontal areas demonstrated an association with the CBF level in the MCC and the PCC, and also were correlated with ADAS-cog score changes. These findings indicate that regional CBF and FC network changes in the medial cholinergic pathway were associated with cognitive performance. It also is suggested that the combined pCASL-MRI and R-fMRI methods could be used to detect regional CBF and FC changes when using drug treatments in mild AD subjects.
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Comparative Study
Embodied empathy for tactile events: Interindividual differences and vicarious somatosensory responses during touch observation.
A growing body of evidence suggests an involvement of the somatosensory cortices for social perception. For example, it has been shown that observing touch on other bodies (in the absence of any real touch on the own body) affects somatosensory brain areas. Thus, understanding others' sensory experiences seems to rely on vicarious activation of somatosensory cortices. ⋯ This activation was associated with trait differences in interpersonal reactivity. Thus, we found that the somatosensory response in primary somatosensory cortex (SI) was associated with the empathy subscale perspective taking. This link demonstrates that vicarious somatosensory responses for simple touch are influenced by the observer's personality traits, therefore suggesting a role for personality traits in a putative mirror neuron system.
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In the present study we employed Conditional Granger Causality (CGC) and Coherence analysis to investigate whether visual motion-related information reaches the human middle temporal complex (hMT+) directly from the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, by-passing the primary visual cortex (V1). Ten healthy human volunteers underwent brain scan examinations by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during two optic flow experiments. In addition to the classical LGN-V1-hMT+ pathway, our results showed a significant direct influence of the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal recorded in LGN over that in hMT+, not mediated by V1 activity, which strongly supports the existence of a bilateral pathway that connects LGN directly to hMT+ and serves visual motion processing. ⋯ Using LGN as a reference region, hMT+ exhibited a statistically significant earlier peak of activation as compared to V1. In conclusion, our findings suggest the co-existence of an alternative route that directly links LGN to hMT+, bypassing V1. This direct pathway may play a significant functional role for the faster detection of motion and may contribute to explain persistence of unconscious motion detection in individuals with severe destruction of primary visual cortex (blindsight).