Neuroimaging

Excerpt

In this month’s Journal Club, we review three papers that explore the role of neuroimaging in three different neurological diseases. These studies may provide a window into the future of how modern imaging techniques may distinguish sub-phenotypes, inform management, and identify anatomical and functional links to areas of the brain not previously considered involved in disease pathology. The complexities of current brain imaging research are not for the faint-hearted, but they will undoubtedly have an increasing impact on clinical practice in the future and with ever-increasing pressure to practice medicine by established protocols the hard data used by imaging represents an attractive information source. The first paper describes an algorithm applied to MR scanning that is able to distinguish patients with unilateral temporal lobe seizures from controls and also determine the side of seizure onset without resort to additional clinical or historical information. The second paper examines white matter tract integrity in Huntington’s disease and shows that abnormalities in white matter connections are present prior to the onset of symptoms. The third paper examines lesion location in patients with thalamic stroke with and without central neuropathic post-stroke pain (CPSP) and demonstrates that in those with CPSP, lesions are located in the more posterior, inferior, and lateral parts of the ventral posterolateral nucleus. …