Pathological Beliefs, Damaged Brains

Narratives and Neurons: Stories of Damaged Brains

Stories register in human memory in special ways, and stories about neurological cases can entertain and move a reader while simultaneously being an important part of any neuroscience curriculum. Here we describe a course taught in the context of the liberal arts curriculum of Baldwin-Wallace College. Students from a variety of disciplines learned basic neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and neuroch...

Measuring consciousness in severely damaged brains.

Significant advances have been made in the behavioral assessment and clinical management of disorders of consciousness (DOC). In addition, functional neuroimaging paradigms are now available to help assess consciousness levels in this challenging patient population. The success of these neuroimaging approaches as diagnostic markers is, however, intrinsically linked to understanding the relation...

Optimized Brain Extraction for Pathological Brains (optiBET)

The study of structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data has greatly benefitted from the development of sophisticated and efficient algorithms aimed at automating and optimizing the analysis of brain data. We address, in the context of the segmentation of brain from non-brain tissue (i.e., brain extraction, also known as skull-stripping), the tension between the increased theoreti...

A pathological role for damaged hyaluronan in synovitis.

Unique pathological tau conformers from Alzheimer’s brains transmit tau pathology in nontransgenic mice

Filamentous tau aggregates are hallmark lesions in numerous neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD). Cell culture and animal studies showed that tau fibrils can undergo cell-to-cell transmission and seed aggregation of soluble tau, but this phenomenon was only robustly demonstrated in models overexpressing tau. In this study, we found that intracerebral inoculation of tau...