Glaucoma: an eye or a brain disease?

Glaucoom wordt traditioneel als een oogziekte gezien, maar verschillende MRI-onderzoeken tonen veranderingen in de rest van het visuele systeem in de hersenen aan die wijzen op schade. Dit zou verklaard kunnen worden doordat de hersenen minder visuele input krijgen, maar zou ook kunnen betekenen dat glaucoom een hersencomponent heeft. Deze openstaande vraag heb ik onderzocht door het analyseren van hersenscans van patiënten met glaucoom (zowel uit Europa als Japan), mensen met eenzijdige blindheid en gezonde controles. Ik vond voor glaucoom — en niet eenzijdige blindheid — aanwijzingen voor neurodegeneratie in het visuele systeem. Dit suggereert dat enkel verminderde visuele input deze veranderingen niet kan verklaren. Daarnaast onderzocht ik hersenstructuren buiten het visuele systeem. Ik vond dat zowel glaucoom als eenzijdige blindheid zijn geassocieerd met witte stof veranderingen in visueel-gerelateerde en niet-visuele hersenstructuren. Echter, die in glaucoom zijn meer uitgebreid (bijvoorbeeld meer aangedane hersenstructuren). Naar mijn mening wijzen dit op de bijdrage van een onafhankelijke hersencomponent in glaucoom. Dit proefschrift draagt daarmee bij aan het idee dat in de toekomst neuroprotectieve medicatie kan worden voorgeschreven om neurodegeneratie van het visuele systeem en andere hersenstructuren te voorkomen, in aanvulling op de standaardbehandeling die gericht is op het oog. Bovendien stelt de betrokkenheid van de hersenen voor dat neuroimaging - mettertijd - nodig is voor de klinische evaluatie van de voortgang en behandeling van de ziekte. Mijn aanbeveling voor toekomstig onderzoek is het ontwikkelen van MRI-gebaseerde instrumenten die in staat zijn om ziekteprogressie in de hersenen te evalueren en monitoren op een individueel niveau

White matter alterations in glaucoma and monocular blindness differ outside the visual system

The degree to which glaucoma has effects in the brain beyond the eye and the visual pathways is unclear. To clarify this, we investigated white matter microstructure (WMM) in 37 tracts of patients with glaucoma, monocular blindness, and controls. We used brainlife.io for reproducibility. White matter tracts were subdivided into seven categories ranging from those primarily involved in vision (the visual white matter) to those primarily involved in cognition and motor control. In the vision tracts, WMM was decreased as measured by fractional anisotropy in both glaucoma and monocular blind subjects compared to controls, suggesting neurodegeneration due to reduced sensory inputs. A test-retest approach was used to validate these results. The pattern of results was different in monocular blind subjects, where WMM properties increased outside the visual white matter as compared to controls. This pattern of results suggests that whereas in the monocular blind loss of visual input might promote white matter reorganization outside of the early visual system, such reorganization might be reduced or absent in glaucoma. The results provide indirect evidence that in glaucoma unknown factors might limit the reorganization as seen in other patient groups following visual loss

brainlife.io: A decentralized and open source cloud platform to support neuroscience research

Neuroscience research has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years by advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, the complexity of the data pipeline has also increased, hindering access to FAIR data analysis to portions of the worldwide research community. brainlife.io was developed to reduce these burdens and democratize modern neuroscience research across institutions and career levels. Using community software and hardware infrastructure, the platform provides open-source data standardization, management, visualization, and processing and simplifies the data pipeline. brainlife.io automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects, supporting simplicity, efficiency, and transparency in neuroscience research. Here brainlife.io's technology and data services are described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability, and scientific utility. Using data from 4 modalities and 3,200 participants, we demonstrate that brainlife.io's services produce outputs that adhere to best practices in modern neuroscience research

brainlife.io: a decentralized and open-source cloud platform to support neuroscience research

Neuroscience is advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, data pipeline complexity has increased, hindering FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) access. brainlife.io was developed to democratize neuroimaging research. The platform provides data standardization, management, visualization and processing and automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects. Here, brainlife.io is described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability and scientific utility using four data modalities and 3,200 participants

Structural brain MRI studies in eye diseases:are they clinically relevant? A review of current findings

Many eye diseases reduce visual acuity or are associated with visual field defects. Because of the well-defined retinotopic organization of the connections of the visual pathways, this may affect specific parts of the visual pathways and cortex, as a result of either deprivation or transsynaptic degeneration. For this reason, over the past several years, numerous structural magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) studies have examined the association of eye diseases with pathway and brain changes. Here, we review structural MRI studies performed in human patients with the eye diseases albinism, amblyopia, hereditary retinal dystrophies, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucoma. We focus on two main questions. First, what have these studies revealed? Second, what is the potential clinical relevance of their findings? We find that all the aforementioned eye diseases are indeed associated with structural changes in the visual pathways and brain. As such changes have been described in very different eye diseases, in our view the most parsimonious explanation is that these are caused by the loss of visual input and the subsequent deprivation of the visual pathways and brain regions, rather than by transsynaptic degeneration. Moreover, and of clinical relevance, for some of the diseases -in particular glaucoma and AMD -present results are compatible with the view that the eye disease is part of a more general neurological or neurodegenerative disorder that also affects the brain. Finally, establishing structural changes of the visual pathways has been relevant in the context of new therapeutic strategies to restore retinal function: it implies that restoring retinal function may not suffice to also effectively restore vision. Future structural MRI studies can contribute to (i) further establish relationships between ocular and neurological neurodegenerative disorders, (ii) investigate whether brain degeneration in eye diseases is reversible, (iii) evaluate the use of neuroprotective medication in ocular disease, (iv) determine optimal timing for retinal implant insertion and (v) establish structural MRI examination as a diagnostic tool in ophthalmology

2nd ICMI Workshop on Bridging Social Sciences and AI for Understanding Child Behaviour

Child behavior is a topic of great scientific interest across a wide range of disciplines, including social and behavioral sciences, as well as artificial intelligence (AI). The first workshop had a significant impact, and in this workshop, we aimed to bring together researchers from these fields to discuss topics such as using AI to better understand and model child behavioral and developmental processes, challenges and opportunities for AI in large-scale child behavior analysis, and implementing explainable ML/AI on sensitive child data. The workshop was a successful second step toward this objective, attracting contributions from many academic fields on child behavior analysis. This document summarizes the workshop’s events as well as the accepted papers and abstracts