Transformations in the Carpathian Basin around 1600 B. C.

Um die Zeit des Vulkanausbruchs von Thera fanden wichtige Veränderungen im Karpatenbecken statt. Diese sogenannte Koszider Epoche korrespondiert mit der letzten Phase der mittleren Bronzezeit in der ungarischen Terminologie und stellt den Übergang zur späten Bronzezeit dar. Die Untersuchung dieser Epoche hat sich bisher als kontrovers erwiesen – sowohl unter ungarischen als auch mitteleuropäischen Wissenschaftlern. Erst in den letzten Jahren ist diese Epoche nicht mehr als kurzer Zeitraum, mit der ein bestimmtes historisches Ereignis verbunden werden kann, interpretiert worden. Vielmehr sieht man sie nun als eine länger dauernde Periode an, welche die Blütezeit der mittleren Bronzezeit im Karpatenbecken markiert und die mit einschneidenden Veränderungen endet. Die Hauptelemente dieses Wandels sind allerdings noch unklar. Unser Ziel ist es, den Wandel durch den Vergleich verschiedener Aspekte dreier aufeinanderfolgender Phasen zu untersuchen. Am Ende sollen einige neue Erwägungen stehen, die die bisherigen Interpretationen dieser Veränderungen erweitern können. | Around the time of the Thera eruption important transformations occurred in the Carpathian Basin. This is the so-called Koszider Period, which corresponds to the last phase of the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) in the Hungarian terminology and represents a transition to the Late Bronze Age. The assessment of the period has been controversial among both Hungarian and central European scholars. In the past few years this period has been interpreted not as a short »horizon« connected to a specific historical event, but as a longer period that represented the heyday of the MBA in the Carpathian Basin, which ended with significant transformations. The main elements of this transformation, however, are still unclear. Our aim is to investigate this transformation through the comparison of several aspects of three subsequent phases and to amend the previously offered interpretations of the changes with a few new considerations

Colocalization of neurons in optical coherence microscopy and Nissl-stained histology in Brodmann’s area 32 and area 21

Published in final edited form as: Brain Struct Funct. 2019 January ; 224(1): 351–362. doi:10.1007/s00429-018-1777-z.Optical coherence tomography is an optical technique that uses backscattered light to highlight intrinsic structure, and when applied to brain tissue, it can resolve cortical layers and fiber bundles. Optical coherence microscopy (OCM) is higher resolution (i.e., 1.25 µm) and is capable of detecting neurons. In a previous report, we compared the correspondence of OCM acquired imaging of neurons with traditional Nissl stained histology in entorhinal cortex layer II. In the current method-oriented study, we aimed to determine the colocalization success rate between OCM and Nissl in other brain cortical areas with different laminar arrangements and cell packing density. We focused on two additional cortical areas: medial prefrontal, pre-genual Brodmann area (BA) 32 and lateral temporal BA 21. We present the data as colocalization matrices and as quantitative percentages. The overall average colocalization in OCM compared to Nissl was 67% for BA 32 (47% for Nissl colocalization) and 60% for BA 21 (52% for Nissl colocalization), but with a large variability across cases and layers. One source of variability and confounds could be ascribed to an obscuring effect from large and dense intracortical fiber bundles. Other technical challenges, including obstacles inherent to human brain tissue, are discussed. Despite limitations, OCM is a promising semi-high throughput tool for demonstrating detail at the neuronal level, and, with further development, has distinct potential for the automatic acquisition of large databases as are required for the human brain.Accepted manuscrip

Cortical thickness, surface area and volume measures in Parkinson's disease, multiple system atrophy and progressive supranuclear palsy

OBJECTIVE Parkinson's disease (PD), Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) and Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) are neurodegenerative diseases that can be difficult to distinguish clinically. The objective of the current study was to use surface-based analysis techniques to assess cortical thickness, surface area and grey matter volume to identify unique morphological patterns of cortical atrophy in PD, MSA and PSP and to relate these patterns of change to disease duration and clinical features. METHODS High resolution 3D T1-weighted MRI volumes were acquired from 14 PD patients, 18 MSA, 14 PSP and 19 healthy control participants. Cortical thickness, surface area and volume analyses were carried out using the automated surface-based analysis package FreeSurfer (version 5.1.0). Measures of disease severity and duration were assessed for correlation with cortical morphometric changes in each clinical group. RESULTS Results show that in PSP, widespread cortical thinning and volume loss occurs within the frontal lobe, particularly the superior frontal gyrus. In addition, PSP patients also displayed increased surface area in the pericalcarine. In comparison, PD and MSA did not display significant changes in cortical morphology. CONCLUSION These results demonstrate that patients with clinically established PSP exhibit distinct patterns of cortical atrophy, particularly affecting the frontal lobe. These results could be used in the future to develop a useful clinical application of MRI to distinguish PSP patients from PD and MSA patients

Intersubject Regularity in the Intrinsic Shape of Human V1

Previous studies have reported considerable intersubject variability in the three-dimensional geometry of the human primary visual cortex (V1). Here we demonstrate that much of this variability is due to extrinsic geometric features of the cortical folds, and that the intrinsic shape of V1 is similar across individuals. V1 was imaged in ten ex vivo human hemispheres using high-resolution (200 μm) structural magnetic resonance imaging at high field strength (7 T). Manual tracings of the stria of Gennari were used to construct a surface representation, which was computationally flattened into the plane with minimal metric distortion. The instrinsic shape of V1 was determined from the boundary of the planar representation of the stria. An ellipse provided a simple parametric shape model that was a good approximation to the boundary of flattened V1. The aspect ration of the best-fitting ellipse was found to be consistent across subject, with a mean of 1.85 and standard deviation of 0.12. Optimal rigid alignment of size-normalized V1 produced greater overlap than that achieved by previous studies using different registration methods. A shape analysis of published macaque data indicated that the intrinsic shape of macaque V1 is also stereotyped, and similar to the human V1 shape. Previoud measurements of the functional boundary of V1 in human and macaque are in close agreement with these results

Simultaneous Matrix Diagonalization for Structural Brain Networks Classification

This paper considers the problem of brain disease classification based on connectome data. A connectome is a network representation of a human brain. The typical connectome classification problem is very challenging because of the small sample size and high dimensionality of the data. We propose to use simultaneous approximate diagonalization of adjacency matrices in order to compute their eigenstructures in more stable way. The obtained approximate eigenvalues are further used as features for classification. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be efficient for detection of Alzheimer's disease, outperforming simple baselines and competing with state-of-the-art approaches to brain disease classification

Előzetes jelentés Hernádbűd-Várdomb bronzkori településének kutatásáról

Hernádbűd-Várdomb területén 2007-2008-ban geodéziai felméréssel, intenzív felszíni leletgyűjtéssel, régészeti célú légifényképek és geofizikai felmérés segítségével kísérletet tettünk a település szerkezeti rekonstrukciójára. A rekonstrukció mellett elvégeztük az összegyűjtött leletanyag régészeti és környezettörténeti értékelését is