Introduction: Myocardial perfusion imaging using gated SPECT and phase analysis is an effective tool in evaluation of mechanical dyssynchrony. The purpose of this study was to determine the normal ranges of global and regional phase parameters. Methods: A total of 100 patients with normal resting and stress electrocardiograms, low pretest likelihood for c...

PURPOSE Locked-in syndrome and vegetative state are distinct outcomes from coma. Despite their differences, they are clinically difficult to distinguish at the early stage and current diagnostic tools remain insufficient. Since some brain functions are preserved in locked-in syndrome, we postulated that networks of spontaneously co-activated brain areas might be present in locked-in patients, s...

Background: Neglecting the pain assessment in intensive care unit (ICU) patients with decreased level of consciousness (LOC) can lead to inappropriate pain management. Implementation of a pain management protocol may contribute to avoiding such negligence. Aim: This study aimed to determine the effect of using a pain monitoring protocol on the pain intensity of ICU patients with decreased LOC. ...

The application of multivoxel pattern analysis methods has attracted increasing attention, particularly for brain state prediction and real-time functional MRI applications. Support vector classification is the most popular of these techniques, owing to reports that it has better prediction accuracy and is less sensitive to noise. Support vector classification was applied to learn functional co...

OBJECTIVE Resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) has been increasingly used for understanding brain functional architecture. To date, most rsfMRI studies have exploited blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast using gradient-echo (GE) echo planar imaging (EPI), which can suffer from image distortion and signal dropout due to magnetic susceptibility and inherent long echo time. In this s...

Over the past several years, resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) has emerged as a novel informative method for investigating the development of large-scale functional networks in the human brain. This method, first used to demonstrate coherent spontaneous low-frequency fluctuations in BOLD signal within the adult somatomotor system (Biswal et al., 1995), involves collecting functional imaging data from...

DEDICATION ~~~ This work is dedicated to my brother Stephen Alwin (1986-2010) who lives on in reactivations of networks in my brain. ~~~ iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the following people for their support and influence over the years: A doctoral program requires patient family members and for that I'm very thankful for the patience and support of my husband David Eagleman. I'...

UNLABELLED The resting brain dynamics self-organize into a finite number of correlated patterns known as resting-state networks (RSNs). It is well known that techniques such as independent component analysis can separate the brain activity at rest to provide such RSNs, but the specific pattern of interaction between RSNs is not yet fully understood. To this aim, we propose here a novel method t...