Therapeutic use of high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in stroke.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Humans↗
Biomedical subjects
Pierre Maquet
Publications and source records attributed to Pierre Maquet.
Early boost and slow consolidation in motor skill learning.
Motorskill learning is a dynamic process that continues covertly after training has ended and eventually leads to delayed increments in performance. Current theories suggest that this off-line improvement takes time and appears only after several hours. Here we show an early transient and short-lived boost in performance, emerging as early as 5-30 min after training but no longer observed 4 h later. This early boost is predictive of the performance achieved 48 h later, suggesting its functional relevance for memory processes.
Adolescent↗
Gemvid, an open source, modular, automated activity recording system for rats using digital video.
BACKGROUND: Measurement of locomotor activity is a valuable tool for analysing factors influencing behaviour and for investigating brain function. Several methods have been described in the literature for measuring the amount of animal movement but most are flawed or expensive. Here, we describe an open source, modular, low-cost, user-friendly, highly sensitive, non-invasive system that records all the movements of a rat in its cage. METHODS: Our activity monitoring system quantifies overall free movements of rodents without any markers, using a commercially available CCTV and a newly designed motion detection software developed on a GNU/Linux-operating computer. The operating principle is that the amount of overall movement of an object can be expressed by the difference in total area occupied by the object in two consecutive picture frames. The application is based on software modules that allow the system to be used in a high-throughput workflow. Documentation, example files, source code and binary files can be freely downloaded from the project website at http://bioinformatics.org/gemvid/. RESULTS: In a series of experiments with objects of pre-defined oscillation frequencies and movements, we documented the sensitivity, reproducibility and stability of our system. We also compared data obtained with our system and data obtained with an Actiwatch device. Finally, to validate the system, results obtained from the automated observation of 6 rats during 7 days in a regular light cycle are presented and are accompanied by a stability test. The validity of this system is further demonstrated through the observation of 2 rats in constant dark conditions that displayed the expected free running of their circadian rhythm. CONCLUSION: The present study describes a system that relies on video frame differences to automatically quantify overall free movements of a rodent without any markers. It allows the monitoring of rats in their own environment for an extended period of time. By using a low-cost, open source hardware/software solution, laboratories can greatly simplify their data acquisition and analysis pipelines and improve their workload.
Journal Article↗
Daytime light exposure dynamically enhances brain responses.
In humans, light enhances both alertness and performance during nighttime and daytime [1-4] and influences regional brain function [5]. These effects do not correspond to classical visual responses but involve a non-image forming (NIF) system, which elicits greater endocrine, physiological, neurophysiological, and behavioral responses to shorter light wavelengths than to wavelengths geared toward the visual system [6-11]. During daytime, the neural changes induced by light exposure, and their time courses, are largely unknown. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we characterized the neural correlates of the alerting effect of daytime light by assessing the responses to an auditory oddball task [12-15], before and after a short exposure to a bright white light. Light-induced improvement in subjective alertness was linearly related to responses in the posterior thalamus. In addition, light enhanced responses in a set of cortical areas supporting attentional oddball effects, and it prevented decreases of activity otherwise observed during continuous darkness. Responses to light were remarkably dynamic. They declined within minutes after the end of the light stimulus, following various region-specific time courses. These findings suggest that light can modulate activity of subcortical structures involved in alertness, thereby dynamically promoting cortical activity in networks involved in ongoing nonvisual cognitive processes.
Acoustic Stimulation↗
A prominent role for amygdaloid complexes in the Variability in Heart Rate (VHR) during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep relative to wakefulness.
Rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) is associated with intense neuronal activity, rapid eye movements, muscular atonia and dreaming. Another important feature in REMS is the instability in autonomic, especially in cardiovascular regulation. The neural mechanisms underpinning the variability in heart rate (VHR) during REMS are not known in detail, especially in humans. During wakefulness, the right insula has frequently been reported as involved in cardiovascular regulation but this might not be the case during REMS. We aimed at characterizing the neural correlates of VHR during REMS as compared to wakefulness and to slow wave sleep (SWS), the other main component of human sleep, in normal young adults, based on the statistical analysis of a set of H(2)(15)O positron emission tomography (PET) sleep data acquired during SWS, REMS and wakefulness. The results showed that VHR correlated more tightly during REMS than during wakefulness with the rCBF in the right amygdaloid complex. Moreover, we assessed whether functional relationships between amygdala and any brain area changed depending the state of vigilance. Only the activity within in the insula was found to covary with the amygdala, significantly more tightly during wakefulness than during REMS in relation to the VHR. The functional connectivity between the amygdala and the insular cortex, two brain areas involved in cardiovascular regulation, differs significantly in REMS as compared to wakefulness. This suggests a functional reorganization of central cardiovascular regulation during REMS.
Adult↗
The locus ceruleus is involved in the successful retrieval of emotional memories in humans.
Emotional memories are better remembered than neutral ones. The amygdala is involved in this enhancement not only by modulating the hippocampal activity, but possibly also by modulating central arousal. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we analyzed the retrieval of neutral faces encoded in emotional or neutral contexts. The pupillary size measured during encoding was used as a modulator of brain responses during retrieval. The interaction between emotion and memory showed significant responses in a set of areas, including the amygdala and parahippocampal gyrus. These areas responded significantly more for correctly remembered faces encoded in an emotional, compared with neutral, context. The same interaction conducted on responses modulated by the pupillary size revealed an area of the dorsal tegmentum of the ponto-mesencephalic region, consistent with the locus ceruleus. Moreover, a psychophysiological interaction showed that amygdalar responses were more tightly related to those of the locus ceruleus when remembering faces that had been encoded in an emotional, rather than neutral, context. These findings suggest that the restoration of a central arousal similar to encoding takes part in the successful retrieval of neutral events learned in an emotional context.
Adult↗
Landau-Kleffner syndrome is not an eponymic badge of ignorance.
In a 1992 editorial article, Landau expressed the hope of collective agreement in the medical community about Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS) in terms of diagnosis criteria, etiology, pathophysiology and rational therapy. Since then, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have led to the view that LKS is an acquired aphasia, secondary to an epileptic disturbance affecting a cortical area involved in verbal processing. This fits with the hypothesis of a "functional ablation" caused by epileptic activity. Under these criteria, epileptic aphasia becomes a subgroup of the continuous spike-waves syndrome in which epileptic discharges originate from the temporal cortex. Genetic predisposition for KLS could be related to hyperexcitability and synchronization of interneurons within the perisylvian cortices, which generate the spike-waves. Activation of these waves during NREM sleep, following thalamo-cortical uncoupling, might then alter the blood brain barrier and provoke an autoimmune reaction. Interneuron hyperactivity might in turn have an antiepileptic protective effect, associated with the inhibition of a specific function, and spike-waves activity over the long term might eventuate in focal atrophy. This morphological defect might explain the poor verbal outcome in some cases of LKS. From this study we recommend a multicenter control study of good design and methodology be carried out to compare the efficacies of early versus delayed (3 months) corticosteroid treatment in patients with typical LKS that is being treated by clobazam (or diazepam) monotherapy.
Adrenal Cortex Hormones↗
Implicit oculomotor sequence learning in humans: Time course of offline processing.
Studies of manual and digital sequence learning indicate that motor memories continue to be processed after training has ended, following a succession of identifiable steps. However, it is not known whether this offline memory processing constitutes a basic feature of motor learning and generalizes to the implicit learning of a sequence of eye movements. To assess this hypothesis, we have created the serial oculomotor reaction time task (SORT). Participants were trained to the SORT then tested after either 30 min, 5 h or 24 h. During training, ocular reaction times decreased monotonically over practice of a repeated sequence, then increased when a different sequence was displayed, demonstrating oculomotor learning of the trained sequence. When tested 30 min after training, a significant gain in oculomotor performance was observed irrespective of the sequence learning. This gain was no longer present after 5 h. Remarkably, a gain in performance specific to the learned sequence emerged only 24 h after training. After testing, a generation task confirmed that most subjects learned implicitly the regularities of the sequence. Our results show that, as for manual or digital sequences, oculomotor sequences can be implicitly learned. The offline processing of oculomotor memories follows distinct stages in a way similar to those observed after manual or digital sequence learning.
Adult↗
Sleep after spatial learning promotes covert reorganization of brain activity.
Sleep promotes the integration of recently acquired spatial memories into cerebral networks for the long term. In this study, we examined how sleep deprivation hinders this consolidation process. Using functional MRI, we mapped regional cerebral activity during place-finding navigation in a virtual town, immediately after learning and 3 days later, in subjects either allowed regular sleep (RS) or totally sleep-deprived (TSD) on the first posttraining night. At immediate and delayed retrieval, place-finding navigation elicited increased brain activity in an extended hippocampo-neocortical network in both RS and TSD subjects. Behavioral performance was equivalent between groups. However, striatal navigation-related activity increased more at delayed retrieval in RS than in TSD subjects. Furthermore, correlations between striatal response and behavioral performance, as well as functional connectivity between the striatum and the hippocampus, were modulated by posttraining sleep. These data suggest that brain activity is restructured during sleep in such a way that navigation in the virtual environment, initially related to a hippocampus-dependent spatial strategy, becomes progressively contingent in part on a response-based strategy mediated by the striatum. Both neural strategies eventually relate to equivalent performance levels, indicating that covert reorganization of brain patterns underlying navigation after sleep is not necessarily accompanied by overt changes in behavior.
Adult↗
Offline persistence of memory-related cerebral activity during active wakefulness.
Much remains to be discovered about the fate of recent memories in the human brain. Several studies have reported the reactivation of learning-related cerebral activity during post-training sleep, suggesting that sleep plays a role in the offline processing and consolidation of memory. However, little is known about how new information is maintained and processed during post-training wakefulness before sleep, while the brain is actively engaged in other cognitive activities. We show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that brain activity elicited during a new learning episode modulates brain responses to an unrelated cognitive task, during the waking period following the end of training. This post-training activity evolves in learning-related cerebral structures, in which functional connections with other brain regions are gradually established or reinforced. It also correlates with behavioral performance. These processes follow a different time course for hippocampus-dependent and hippocampus-independent memories. Our experimental approach allowed the characterization of the offline evolution of the cerebral correlates of recent memories, without the confounding effect of concurrent practice of the learned material. Results indicate that the human brain has already extensively processed recent memories during the first hours of post-training wakefulness, even when simultaneously coping with unrelated cognitive demands.
Adult↗
Brain response to one's own name in vegetative state, minimally conscious state, and locked-in syndrome.
BACKGROUND: A major challenge in the management of severely brain-injured patients with altered states of consciousness is to estimate their residual perception of the environment. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the integrity of detection of one's own name in patients in a behaviorally well-documented vegetative state (VS), patients in a minimally conscious state (MCS), and patients with locked-in syndrome. DESIGN: We recorded the auditory evoked potentials to the patient's own name and to 7 other equiprobable first names in 15 brain-damaged patients. RESULTS: A P3 component was observed in response to the patient's name in all patients with locked-in syndrome, in all MCS patients, and in 3 of 5 patients in a VS. P3 latency was significantly (P<.05) delayed for MCS and VS patients compared with healthy volunteers. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that partially preserved semantic processing could be observed in noncommunicative brain-damaged patients, notably for the detection of salient stimuli, such as the subject's own name. This function seems delayed in MCS and (if present) in VS patients. More important, a P3 response does not necessarily reflect conscious perception and cannot be used to differentiate VS from MCS patients.
Acoustic Stimulation↗
Tracking the recovery of consciousness from coma.
Predicting the chances of recovery of consciousness and communication in patients who survive their coma but transit in a vegetative state or minimally conscious state (MCS) remains a major challenge for their medical caregivers. Very few studies have examined the slow neuronal changes underlying functional recovery of consciousness from severe chronic brain damage. A case study in this issue of the JCI reports an extraordinary recovery of functional verbal communication and motor function in a patient who remained in MCS for 19 years (see the related article beginning on page 2005). Diffusion tensor MRI showed increased fractional anisotropy (assumed to reflect myelinated fiber density) in posteromedial cortices, encompassing cuneus and precuneus. These same areas showed increased glucose metabolism as studied by PET scanning, likely reflecting the neuronal regrowth paralleling the patient's clinical recovery. This case shows that old dogmas need to be oppugned, as recovery with meaningful reduction in disability continued in this case for nearly 2 decades after extremely severe traumatic brain injury.
Coma↗
The neural correlates of implicit and explicit sequence learning: Interacting networks revealed by the process dissociation procedure.
In two H2(15)O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance during a subsequent sequence generation task. To manipulate the extent to which the repeating sequential pattern was learned explicitly, we varied the pace of the choice reaction time task-a variable that is known to have differential effects on the extent to which sensitivity to sequence structure involves implicit or explicit knowledge. Results showed that activity in the striatum subtends the implicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence, whereas the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) supports the explicit component. Most importantly, we found that the ACC/MPFC exerts control on the activity of the striatum during retrieval of the sequence after explicit learning, whereas the activity of these regions is uncoupled when learning had been essentially implicit. These data suggest that implicit learning processes can be successfully controlled by conscious knowledge when learning is essentially explicit. They also supply further evidence for a partial dissociation between the neural substrates supporting conscious and nonconscious components of performance during recollection of a learned sequence.
Adolescent↗
Cerebral correlates of delta waves during non-REM sleep revisited.
We aimed at characterizing the neural correlates of delta activity during Non Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep in non-sleep-deprived normal young adults, based on the statistical analysis of a positron emission tomography (PET) sleep data set. One hundred fifteen PET scans were obtained using H(2)(15)O under continuous polygraphic monitoring during stages 2-4 of NREM sleep. Correlations between regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) and delta power (1.5-4 Hz) spectral density were analyzed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM2). Delta power values obtained at central scalp locations negatively correlated during NREM sleep with rCBF in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the basal forebrain, the striatum, the anterior insula, and the precuneus. These regions embrace the set of brain areas in which rCBF decreases during slow wave sleep (SWS) as compared to Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and wakefulness (Maquet, P., Degueldre, C., Delfiore, G., Aerts, J., Peters, J.M., Luxen, A., Franck, G., 1997. Functional neuroanatomy of human slow wave sleep. J. Neurosci. 17, 2807-S2812), supporting the notion that delta activity is a valuable prominent feature of NREM sleep. A strong association was observed between rCBF in the ventromedial prefrontal regions and delta power, in agreement with electrophysiological studies. In contrast to the results of a previous PET study investigating the brain correlates of delta activity (Hofle, N., Paus, T., Reutens, D., Fiset, P., Gotman, J., Evans, A.C., Jones, B.E., 1997. Regional cerebral blood flow changes as a function of delta and spindle activity during slow wave sleep in humans. J. Neurosci. 17, 4800-4808), in which waking scans were mixed with NREM sleep scans, no correlation was found with thalamus activity. This latter result stresses the importance of an extra-thalamic delta rhythm among the synchronous NREM sleep oscillations. Consequently, this rCBF distribution might preferentially reflect a particular modulation of the cellular processes involved in the generation of cortical delta waves during NREM sleep.
Adult↗
Current status of brain imaging in sleep medicine.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Brain↗
An empirical Bayesian solution to the source reconstruction problem in EEG.
Distributed linear solutions of the EEG source localisation problem are used routinely. In contrast to discrete dipole equivalent models, distributed linear solutions do not assume a fixed number of active sources and rest on a discretised fully 3D representation of the electrical activity of the brain. The ensuing inverse problem is underdetermined and constraints or priors are required to ensure the uniqueness of the solution. In a Bayesian framework, the conditional expectation of the source distribution, given the data, is attained by carefully balancing the minimisation of the residuals induced by noise and the improbability of the estimates as determined by their priors. This balance is specified by hyperparameters that control the relative importance of fitting and conforming to various constraints. Here we formulate the conventional "Weighted Minimum Norm" (WMN) solution in terms of hierarchical linear models. An "Expectation-Maximisation" (EM) algorithm is used to obtain a "Restricted Maximum Likelihood" (ReML) estimate of the hyperparameters, before estimating the "Maximum a Posteriori" solution itself. This procedure can be considered a generalisation of previous work that encompasses multiple constraints. Our approach was compared with the "classic" WMN and Maximum Smoothness solutions, using a simplified 2D source model with synthetic noisy data. The ReML solution was assessed with four types of source location priors: no priors, accurate priors, inaccurate priors, and both accurate and inaccurate priors. The ReML approach proved useful as: (1) The regularisation (or influence of the a priori source covariance) increased as the noise level increased. (2) The localisation error (LE) was negligible when accurate location priors were used. (3) When accurate and inaccurate location priors were used simultaneously, the solution was not influenced by the inaccurate priors. The ReML solution was then applied to real somatosensory-evoked responses to illustrate the application in an empirical setting.
Algorithms↗
Neural mechanisms involved in the detection of our first name: a combined ERPs and PET study.
In everyday social interactions, hearing our own first name captures our attention and gives rise to a sense of self-awareness, since it is one of the most socially self related stimulus. In the present study, we combined ERPs and PET scan methods to explore the cerebral mechanisms underlying the detection of our own name. While categorical analyses of PET data failed to reveal significant results, we found that the amplitude of the P3 component, elicited when hearing one's own name, correlates with regional cerebral blood changes in right superior temporal sulcus, precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex. Additionally, the latter was more correlated to the P3 obtained for the subject's name compared to that obtained for other first names. These results suggest that the medial prefrontal cortex plays the most prominent role in self-processing.
Adult↗
Human cognition during REM sleep and the activity profile within frontal and parietal cortices: a reappraisal of functional neuroimaging data.
In this chapter, we aimed at further characterizing the functional neuroanatomy of the human rapid eye movement (REM) sleep at the population level. We carried out a meta-analysis of a large dataset of positron emission tomography (PET) scans acquired during wakefulness, slow wave sleep and REM sleep, and focused especially on the brain areas in which the activity diminishes during REM sleep. Results show that quiescent regions are confined to the inferior and middle frontal cortex and to the inferior parietal lobule. Providing a plausible explanation for some of the features of dream reports, these findings may help in refining the concepts, which try to account for human cognition during REM sleep. In particular, we discuss the significance of these results to explain the alteration in executive processes, episodic memory retrieval and self representation during REM sleep dreaming as well as the incorporation of external stimuli into the dream narrative.
Cognition↗