White matter hyperintensities as seen on brain T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging are associated with varying degrees of cognitive dysfunction in stroke, cerebral small vessel disease and dementia. The pathophysiological mechanisms within the white matter accounting for cognitive dysfunction remain unclear. With the hypothesis that gliovascular interactions are impaired in subjects with hig...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE As in adult imaging, FLAIR can be applied to pediatric brain imaging, and this requires an appreciation of the normal pediatric brain appearance by FLAIR imaging. The purpose of this study was to describe the MR appearance of the brain in normal infants and young children as demonstrated by fluid-attenuated inversion-recovery (FLAIR) MR imaging. METHODS We retrospective...

in this paper, we present a new brain tissue segmentation method based on a hybrid hierarchical approach that combines a brain atlas as a priori information and a least-square support vector machine (ls-svm). the method consists of three steps. in the first two steps, the skull is removed and cerebrospinal fluid (csf) is extracted. these two steps are performed using the fast toolbox (fmrib's a...

MR imaging has found abnormalities compatible with low-grade edema in the brain of patients with cirrhosis that have been related to hepatic encephalopathy. We present 3 patients with hepatic encephalopathy who exhibit supratentorial focal or diffuse white matter lesions compatible with small-vessel brain disease. The volume and number of white matter lesions reduced with the improvement of hep...

The study of brain plasticity has tended to focus on the synapse, where well-described activity-dependent mechanisms are known to play a key role in learning and memory. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that plasticity occurs beyond the synapse. This review focuses on the emerging concept of white matter plasticity. For example, there is growing evidence, both from animal studies and ...

The structure of the human brain changes in several ways throughout childhood and adolescence. Perhaps the most salient of these changes is the strengthening of white matter tracts that enable distal brain regions to communicate with one another more quickly and efficiently. Here, we sought to understand whether and how white matter changes contribute to improved reasoning ability over developm...

Quantifying the microstructural properties of the human brain's connections is necessary for understanding normal ageing and disease. Here we examine brain white matter magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data in 3,513 generally healthy people aged 44.64-77.12 years from the UK Biobank. Using conventional water diffusion measures and newer, rarely studied indices from neurite orientation dispersio...

A fundamental tenet of the "disconnectivity" theories of schizophrenia is that the disorder is ultimately caused by abnormal communication between spatially disparate brain structures. Given that the white matter fasciculi represent the primary infrastructure for long distance communication in the brain, abnormalities in these fiber bundles have been implicated in the etiology of schizophrenia....

Diffusion tensor imaging was used to compare white matter structure between American monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual adults living in the United States. In the bilingual group, relationships between white matter structure and naturalistic immersive experience in listening to and speaking English were additionally explored. White matter structural differences between groups were found ...

The authors investigated the association of white matter lesions and lacunar infarcts with cognitive performance and whether brain atrophy mediates these associations. Within the Second Manifestations of Arterial Disease-Magnetic Resonance study (2001-2005, the Netherlands), cross-sectional analyses of 522 patients were performed (mean age, 57 years (standard deviation, 10); 76% male). Brain se...