A Systemic Review of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy for Stroke: Current Application and Future Directions

Background: Survivors of stroke often experience significant disability and impaired quality of life. The recovery of motor or cognitive function requires long periods. Neuroimaging could measure changes in the brain and monitor recovery process in order to offer timely treatment and assess the effects of therapy. A non-invasive neuroimaging technique near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with its ambulatory, portable, low-cost nature without fixation of subjects has attracted extensive attention.Methods: We conducted a comprehensive literature review in order to review the use of NIRS in stroke or post-stroke patients in July 2018. NCBI Pubmed database, EMBASE database, Cochrane Library and ScienceDirect database were searched.Results: Overall, we reviewed 66 papers. NIRS has a wide range of application, including in monitoring upper limb, lower limb recovery, motor learning, cortical function recovery, cerebral hemodynamic changes, cerebral oxygenation, as well as in therapeutic method, clinical researches, and evaluation of the risk for stroke.Conclusions: This study provides a preliminary evidence of the application of NIRS in stroke patients as a monitoring, therapeutic, and research tool. Further studies could give more emphasize on the combination of NIRS with other techniques and its utility in the prevention of stroke

TREATMENT OF COGNITIVE DEFICITS IN ALZHEIMER\u27S DISEASE: A PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGICAL REVIEW

The growing and aging population has contributed to the increased prevalence of Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) and other types of dementia in the world. AD is a progressive and degenerative brain disease with an onset characterized by episodic memory impairments, although progressive deficits can be observed in several domains including language, executive functions, attention and working memory. The relationship between cognitive impairments and the topography and progression of brain neuropathology is well established. The pathophysiologic mechanisms and processes that underline the course of cognitive and clinical decline have been the theoretical support for the development of pharmacological treatments for AD. Cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEIs) and Nmethyl- D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonists are the main drugs used in the management of global cognitive impairment and several studies also explore the effects of both in specific cognitive measures. Recent research trends also examine the effects of combination therapy using both compounds. This review aims to update practical recommendations for the treatment of global cognitive functioning and specific neurocognitive deficits in AD using ChEIs, NMDA antagonists and combination therapy with both drugs

NMDA receptor expression changes on ventral tegmental (VTA) dopamine neurons after acute cocaine exposure

Drug-evoked synaptic plasticity in the mesolimbic dopamine system reorganizes neural circuits that may lead to addictive compulsive behavior. The first cocaine exposure potentiates AMPAR excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs) onto DA neurons of the VTA, but reduces the amplitude of NMDAR-EPSCs. While the plasticity of AMPA transmission is expressed by insertion of calcium (Ca2+)-permeable GluA2-lacking receptors, little is known about the expression mechanism for the altered NMDAR transmission. Combining ex vivo patch clamp recordings, mouse genetics and subcellular Ca2+ imaging, we observe that cocaine drives the insertion of NMDARs that are quasi Ca2+-impermeable and contain GluN3A and GluN2B subunits. These GluN3A-containing NMDARs appear necessary for the expression of cocaine-evoked plasticity of AMPARs. We identify an mGluR1 dependent mechanism to remove these "non-canonical" NMDARs that requires Homer/Shank interaction and protein synthesis. Our data provide insight into the early cocaine-driven reorganization of glutamatergic transmission onto DA neurons and offers GluN3A-containing NMDARs as a new target in drug addiction

Self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffold treatment to acutely injured olfactory bulb

published_or_final_versionAnatomyMasterMaster of Philosoph

Wavelet entropy and directed acyclic graph support vector machine for detection of patients with unilateral hearing loss in MRI scanning

(Aim) Sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) is correlated to many neurodegenerative disease. Now more and more computer vision based methods are using to detect it in an automatic way. (Materials) We have in total 49 subjects, scanned by 3.0T MRI (Siemens Medical Solutions, Erlangen, Germany). The subjects contain 14 patients with right-sided hearing loss (RHL), 15 patients with left-sided hearing loss (LHL), and 20 healthy controls (HC). (Method) We treat this as a three-class classification problem: RHL, LHL, and HC. Wavelet entropy (WE) was selected from the magnetic resonance images of each subjects, and then submitted to a directed acyclic graph support vector machine (DAG-SVM). (Results) The 10 repetition results of 10-fold cross validation shows 3-level decomposition will yield an overall accuracy of 95.10% for this three-class classification problem, higher than feedforward neural network, decision tree, and naive Bayesian classifier. (Conclusions) This computer-aided diagnosis system is promising. We hope this study can attract more computer vision method for detecting hearing loss