Telehealth Brain Injury Training for Rural Behavioral Health Generalists: Supporting and Enhancing Rural Service Delivery Networks.

Rural psychologists are frontline primary behavioral health care providers for nearly 60 million Americans, but they face limited access to peer consultation and continuing education. This article describes a program that matched 70 rehabilitation inpatients who had new brain injury with rural clinicians from patients' home communities. Neuropsychologists provided one-on-one training for clinicians through telehealth video teleconferencing. Clinicians showed gains in brain injury knowledge, and clients rated trained providers higher than untrained providers. Families seeking brain injury services can connect with these trained rural providers through a Web site, which receives more than 800 hits per month. Telehealth offers potential for rural clinicians to receive support, reduce professional isolation, gain working knowledge of specialty conditions, and deliver high-quality services for their rural clients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Magnetization transfer with echo planar imaging

The aim of magnetization transfer is to saturate the protons of the macromolecule pool with a radiofrequency (RF) pulse leading to differences in free water pool signal. Magnetization transfer (MT) contrast is difficult to achieve with the echo planar imaging (EPI) technique, although its short acquisition time would be most beneficial. Indeed, the RF saturation pulses can only be applied once before sampling the whole k-space in a single-short sequence. A possible solution to improve the sensitivity of EPI to magnetization transfer consists in applying a train of several saturation RF pulses before image acquisition. The different parameters of a RF pulse train and their influence on the MT rate have been tested to optimize an EPI clinical sequence. Our experimental procedure makes it possible to obtain a MT map in about 1 second. The technique is evaluated by multiple sclerosis lesion characterization. Supported by grants from the French research ministry and Siemens medical France.     

Personality and Emotion: Test of Gray's Personality Theory by Means of an fMRI Study.

Although it is known that there are fundamental personality differences in the behavioral responses to emotional stimuli, traits have scarcely been investigated in this context by means of functional imaging studies. To maximize the variance with respect to personality, the authors tested 12 control subjects and 12 subjects who had sadomasochistic experiences with respect to the relationship between J. A. Gray's (1970) personality dimensions, the behavioral approach system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), and brain activity in regions of interest. The BIS was associated with activity in numerous brain areas in response to fear, disgust, and erotic visual stimuli, whereas few associations could he detected between the BAS and brain activity in response to disgust and erotic stimuli. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Does a Pigeon (Columba livia) Brain Look Like During Homing? Selective Examination of ZENK Expression.

Lesion studies have shown that the avian hippocampus plays a crucial role in homing pigeon (Columba livia) navigation. Using the expression of the immediate early gene protein ZENK in intact pigeons, the authors found regional variation in hippocampal activation as a consequence of homing and, necessarily, the behavior and internal states that accompany it. Specifically, pigeons that homed displayed a significant increase in the number of ZENK-labeled cells in the lateral hippocampal formation compared with pigeons that did not home, whereas no difference was seen in the medial hippocampus. Significant changes in ZENK expression were also found in the medial striatum, which resembles the mammalian ventral striatum. The results identify portions of the hippocampal formation and the medial striatum as sites of plasticity associated with homing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prediction of Cognitive Abilities 1 Year Following Traumatic Brain Injury From Inpatient Rehabilitation Cognitive Screening.

Objective: To evaluate the ability of the Cognitive Log (Cog-Log) to predict neuropsychological outcome at 1 year after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Study Design: The Orientation Log (O-Log) and Cog-Log were administered during morning rounds, and a battery of neuropsychological tests was administered at 1 year postinjury. Setting: Acute rehabilitation hospital. Participants: Fifty rehabilitation inpatients. Main Outcome Measures: Composite scores for processing speed, attention, language, memory, executive functioning, and visuospatial abilities. Results: The Cog-Log was found to significantly predict 1-year outcome in attention, executive functioning, and visuospatial abilities. The O-Log contributed significantly to memory outcome. The Disability Rating Scale was not a significant predictor. Conclusions: The Cog-Log has utility as a predictor of neuropsychological outcome, particularly when used with its companion instrument, the O-Log. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of traumatic brain injury on working memory-related brain activation in adolescents.

Eight adolescents (ages 13-18 years) who sustained traumatic brain injury (TBI) and eight gender- and age-matched typically developing (TD) adolescents underwent event-related functional MRI (fMRI) while performing a Sternberg letter recognition task. Encoding, maintenance, and retrieval were examined with memory loads of one or four items during imaging. Both groups performed above a 70% accuracy criterion and did not differ in performance. TD adolescents showed greater increase in frontal and parietal activation during high-load relative to low-load maintenance than the TBI group. The TBI patients showed greater increase in activation during high-load relative to low-load encoding and retrieval than the TD group. Results from this preliminary study suggest that the capability to differentially allocate neural resources according to memory load is disrupted by TBI for the maintenance subcomponent of working memory. The overrecruitment of frontal and extrafrontal regions during encoding and retrieval following TBI may represent a compensatory process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multi‐modal brain tumor image segmentation based on SDAE

Accurate tumor segmentation has the ability to provide doctors with a basis for surgical planning. Moreover, brain tumor segmentation needs to extract different tumor tissues (Edema, tumor, tumor enhancement, and necrosis) from normal tissues which is a big challenge because tumor structures vary considerably across patients in terms of size, extension, and localization. In this article, we evaluate a fully automated method for segmenting brain tumor images from multi‐modal magnetic resonance imaging volumes based on stacked de‐noising auto‐encoders (SDAEs). Specially, we adopted multi‐modality information from T1, T1c, T2, and Flair images, respectively. We extracted gray level patches from different modalities as the input of the SDAE. After trained by the SDAE, the raw network parameters will be obtained, which are adopted as a parameter of the feed forward neural network for classification. A simple post‐processing is implemented by threshold segmentation method to generate a mask to get the final segmentation result. By evaluating the proposed method on the BRATS 2015, it can be proven that our method obtains the better performance than other state‐of‐the‐art counterpart methods. And a preliminary dice score of 0.86 for whole tumor segmentation has been achieved.     

NKG2C+ NK Cells for Immunotherapy of Glioblastoma Multiforme

In glioblastoma, non-classical human leucocyte antigen E (HLA-E) and HLA-G are frequently overexpressed. HLA-E loaded with peptides derived from HLA class I and from HLA-G contributes to inhibition of natural killer (NK) cells with expression of the inhibitory receptor CD94/NKG2A. We investigated whether NK cells expressing the activating CD94/NKG2C receptor counterpart were able to exert anti-glioma effects. NKG2C+ subsets were preferentially expanded by a feeder cell line engineered to express an artificial disulfide-stabilized trimeric HLA-E ligand (HLA-E*spG). NK cells expanded by a feeder cell line, which facilitates outgrowth of conventional NKG2A+, and fresh NK cells, were included for comparison. Expansion via the HLA-E*spG feeder cells selectively increased the fraction of NKG2C+ NK cells, which displayed a higher frequency of KIR2DL2/L3/S2 and CD16 when compared to expanded NKG2A+ NK cells. NKG2C+ NK cells exhibited increased cytotoxicity against K562 and KIR:HLA-matched and -mismatched primary glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cells when compared to NKG2A+ NK cells and corresponding fresh NK cells. Cytotoxic responses of NKG2C+ NK cells were even more pronounced when utilizing target cells engineered with HLA-E*spG. These findings support the notion that NKG2C+ NK cells have potential therapeutic value for treating gliomas.     

参与中文配对词语联想学习记忆的脑区和神经机制——脑功能磁共振的研究

通过脑功能磁共振技术,研究健康人参与语言的词语配对联想学习记忆任务的脑区和神经机制。对16名右利手健康志愿者进行一项词语配对联想学习记忆任务作业的同时,进行脑功能磁共振扫描。实验采用组块设计,实验任务（包括记忆编码相和记忆提取相）与对照任务（共两个相）交替进行;数据采用SPM99软件进行数据分析和脑功能区定位。结果表明：左侧额叶,特别是左侧额叶的额中下回和枕叶的18,19区在词语联想学习记忆的编码阶段中起重要作用;而左侧顶上小叶、缘上回和角回则在进行记忆提取阶段起重要作用;左侧纹状体边缘区参与了人脑词语联想学习记忆作业的编码阶段。揭示了人大脑完成语言联想学习记忆任务时,除额、顶、枕和颞叶的皮层结构参与外,还新发现有皮层下结构如纹状体参与了词语联想学习记忆。在配对词语的编码和提取阶段,激活的脑区有所变化,显示了这两个语言阶段的神经活动变化机制。     

基于EEG微状态方法的视觉想象识别研究

运动想象M I是基于想象的脑机交互BCI中常用的任务,但M I不易习得和控制,且存在"BCI盲"现象,使得该类BCI的实用化受限.针对较易习得和控制的视觉想象VI任务进行识别,旨在构建基于VI的BCI(VI-BCI).招募了15名被试者参加2种动态图像的视觉想象任务并采集脑电EEG数据;然后采用EEG微状态方法研究了这...