Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

Background and Purpose—The authors present an overview of the current evidence and management recommendations for evaluation and treatment of adults with acute ischemic stroke. The intended audienc...

/pdf/guidelines-for-the-early-management-of-patients-with-acute-19udbft6e7.pdf

Guidelines for the Early Management of Patients With Acute Ischemic Stroke A Guideline for Healthcare Professionals From the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association

We present a technique for automatically assigning a neuroanatomical label to each location on a cortical surface model based on probabilistic information estimated from a manually labeled training set. This procedure incorporates both geometric information derived from the cortical model, and neuroanatomical convention, as found in the training set. The result is a complete labeling of cortical sulci and gyri. Examples are given from two different training sets generated using different neuroanatomical conventions, illustrating the flexibility of the algorithm. The technique is shown to be comparable in accuracy to manual labeling.

/pdf/automatically-parcellating-the-human-cerebral-cortex-16g7uhc9ep.pdf

Automatically Parcellating the Human Cerebral Cortex

Teacher stress and burnout has been associated with low job satisfaction, reduced emotional wellbeing, and poor student learning outcomes. Prolonged stress is associated with emotion dysregulation and has thus become a focus of stress interventions. This study examines emotional interference effects in a group of teachers suffering from high stress and to explore how individual differences in cognitive control, emotion dysregulation, and emotion recognition related to patterns of neural activation. Forty-nine teachers suffering moderate-high stress participated in an emotional counting Stroop task while their brain activity was imaged using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants viewed general or teacher specific words of either negative or neutral valence and were required to count the number of words on screen. Behavioural and neuroimaging results suggest that teachers are able to control emotional responses to negative stimuli, as no evidence of emotional interference was detected. However, patterns of neural activation revealed early shared engagement of regions involved in cognitive reappraisal during negative task conditions and unique late engagement of the hippocampus only while counting teacher-specific negative words. Further, we identified that greater emotion dysregulation was associated with increased activation of regions involved in cognitive control processes during neutral word trials. Teachers who showed slower emotion recognition performance were also found to have greater activation in regions associated with visual and word processing, specifically during the teacher specific negative word condition of the task. Future research should explore emotion regulation strategy use in teachers and utilise temporally sensitive neuroimaging techniques to further understand these findings. 

/pdf/neural-activation-during-emotional-interference-corresponds-21ofzmji.pdf

Neural activation during emotional interference corresponds to emotion dysregulation in stressed teachers

Echo time based influences on quantitative susceptibility mapping

Uecker and coworkers claim that our conclusion in Ref. 1 was supported by neither the theoretical arguments nor the experimental data presented. They purport that image improvements were due to an incorrect restoration of the low-resolution signal as a consequence of the interpolation method used, and high-frequency noise causes an illusion of resolution enhancement. We used the zero-filling approach to implement sinc interpolation (2), which is identical to their method. We tested our method with and without the addition of noise, and showed that improvements were present in both cases (see Figs. 4 and 5 in Ref. 1). Therefore, image enhancement was not an illusion caused by high-frequency noise components. Furthermore, comparison of Fig. 4(a) to (b) in Ref. 1 shows that enhancement is most observable at object features, where dimensions are near the effective width of the point spread function (PSF). We conducted a point source simulation to explain why image shifts provide different information to sinc interpolation. According to sampling theory, if a continuous signal is sampled at the Nyquist rate, then it can be recovered exactly using the sinc function over an infinite number of sample points (3). In practice, however, sampling is finite. Therefore, we considered a finite number of samples and different sampling locations with respect to point source location. In Fig. 1, a point source is represented as a sinc function, corresponding to the shape of the PSF. The solid line represents the real data, sampled according to the Nyquist rate at locations of circles. The dot-dashed line is the interpolation obtained by zero-filling of the Fourier transform of the discrete samples. We are interested in the magnitude of the main lobe of the interpolated data, because it defines point source strength. We ignore side lobes, as they contribute to image background noise. Figure 1 shows that, when point source and sampling location misalign, the interpolated main lobe peak is smaller than that of the solid line. Here, we found the ratio between the height of the peak of the interpolated and solid curves, when the point source is at a half distance between sampling points, to be 0.92, 0.96, and 0.97 for 10, 20, and 30 samples, respectively. Therefore, the difference reduces as a number of samples increase. Figure 2 depicts two point sources, one aligned with a sampling point and another shifted by two and a half distances between sampling points. The result shows that

MRI demodulation frequency changes provide different information

We congratulate Iwanaga and colleagues (Iwanaga et al., 2019) including Ms. Yoshino on the recent publication of their descriptive report regarding the anatomy of the lumbar ligamentum flavum. We are particularly impressed by the preservation of anatomical relationships within the embedded tissue and the resulting histological sections. Many authors have either commented on or published images with fractures or folds affecting the quality of the sections (Okuda et al., 2004; Ramsey, 1966; Rissanen, 1960; Scapinelli et al., 2006; Yahia et al., 1989). This arises from the difficulty that this tissue presents for histological processing. To have three serial sections presented in reasonable condition is laudable and highlights the quality of data at hand. Our group is currently exploring the effect of obesity upon the interspinous ligament in a combined MRI/dissection study funded by the Australia and New Zealand College of Anesthetists. We hypothesize that islands of adipose tissue may populate an anterior midline gap in the ligament, which is associated with the ligamentum flavum divergence. The results published by Iwanaga and colleagues (Iwanaga et al., 2019) are consistent with progress we have made regarding the detailed anatomy of the lumbar interspinous ligaments. Our hypothesis is at least partially supported by the comment that “The interspinous ligament split into right and left parts at the junction with ligamentum flavum”. Although Rissanen (1960) and Heylings (1978) also made this observation, we have not noted the inclusion of this feature in an anatomical textbook before 2005 (Lawrence et al., 2017). Even today, it is not part of the standard anatomical descriptions of the interspinous ligament. As part of his study, Rissanen (1960)) examined 114 individuals less than 11 years of age. He described dense deposits of adipose tissue in this anterior split of the interspinous ligament. This would be expected to leave a legacy of adipocytes. Having shared the clinical experience of difficult epidural analgesia in severely morbidly obese individuals (Saravanakumar et al., 2006), we postulate that adipose tissue in the interspinous ligament may be an additional but unexplored factor (Hameed et al., 2012). The gross dissection portion of our study included small serial sections (<0.5 mm) through the interspinous ligament and ligamentum flavum at the level of the interspinous portion of the ligamentum flavum to measure and document the nature of these structures. At all times, these small sections from embalmed body donors remained as one unit, reinforcing the understanding of the ligamentum flavum as a single layer that is confluent with the interspinous ligament. The histological techniques used by Iwanaga and colleagues would prevent direct staining for lipids. It would offer new insights though, if the authors could comment on the nature of tissue and cells in the area of interspinous ligament splitting that was described.

David C. Reutens

Papers

Neural activation during emotional interference corresponds to emotion dysregulation in stressed teachers

Echo time based influences on quantitative susceptibility mapping

MRI demodulation frequency changes provide different information

The Lumbar Ligamentum Flavum Does Not Have Two Layers and Is Confluent with the Interspinous Ligament.

Cognitive and Behavioral Profile of Australian Individuals with Williams Syndrome