The present paper explores the urban dynamicity and urban growth types of Raiganj, a small city in West Bengal. The paper evaluates the landuse landcover (LULC) changes and spatial expansion of the ...urban area for the year 1991, 2001, 2011, and 2019. The LULC Change revealed that the unsustainable trend of built-up expansion continued in this area. The built-up area increased 4.30 percent (1991) to 20.25 percent (2019), resulting in a loss in prime agricultural land, fallow land, and vegetation. The weights of evidence and Pearson’s Chi-square test have revealed that Raiganj (UA) has a low degree of freedom. Shannon entropy results indicates that high growth of sprawl is taking place in Raiganj (UA). The analysis of urban growth types shows that the urban growth took place as edge expansion in the beginning (1991–2001), which has been increased in 2001–2011 and 2011–2019. The study has established that it is useful to identify recent and future urban growth, urban growth typology, and development that help local planning authorities manage growth and development following the area's environmental or ecological carrying capacity.
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients show brain tissue changes in mood and cognitive regulatory sites, but the nature and extent of tissue injury and their associations with symptoms are unclear. ...Our aim was to examine brain tissue damage in T2DM over controls using mean diffusivity (MD) computed from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and assess correlations with mood and cognitive symptoms in T2DM. We collected DTI series (MRI), mood, and cognitive data, from 169 subjects (68 T2DM and 101 controls). Whole-brain MD-maps were calculated, normalized, smoothed, and compared between groups, as well as correlated with mood and cognition scores in T2DM subjects. Type 2 diabetes patients showed altered cognitive and mood functions over control subjects. Multiple brain sites in T2DM patients showed elevated MD values, indicating chronic tissue changes, including the cerebellum, insula, and frontal and prefrontal cortices, cingulate, and lingual gyrus. Associations between MD values and mood and cognition scores appeared in brain sites mediating these functions. Type 2 diabetes patients show predominantly chronic brain tissue changes in areas mediating mood and cognition functions, and tissue changes from those regions correlate with mood and cognitive symptoms suggesting that the microstructural brain changes may account for the observed functional deficits.
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is accompanied by sleep fragmentation and altered sleep architecture, which can potentially hinder the glymphatic system, increasing risks for Alzheimer's disease (AD), ...but the status is unclear in OSA. Our aim was to investigate the glymphatic system in OSA subjects and examine the relationships between OSA disease severity, sleep symptoms, and glymphatic system indices in OSA using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
We acquired DTI data from 59 OSA and 62 controls using a 3.0-Tesla MRI and examined OSA disease severity and sleep symptoms with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS). Diffusivity maps in the
-axis (D
),
-axis (D
), and
-axis (D
), as well as in
axis (D
),
axis (D
), and
axis (D
) were calculated, diffusion values for the projection and association fibers extracted, and the DTI analyses along the perivascular space (DTI-ALPS index) were performed. The glymphatic system indices were compared between groups and correlated with disease severity and sleep symptoms in OSA subjects.
D
values, derived from projection fiber areas, D
and D
values from association fiber areas, as well as ALPS and D
values were significantly reduced in OSA over controls. Significant correlations emerged between disease severity, sleep symptoms, and D
, D
, and D
values in OSA subjects.
OSA patients show abnormal glymphatic system function that may contribute to increased risks for AD. The findings suggest that the APLS method can be used to assess the glymphatic system in OSA patients.
Cystic fibrosis (CF) patients present with a variety of symptoms, including mood and cognition deficits, in addition to classical respiratory, and autonomic issues. This suggests that brain injury, ...which can be examined with non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is a manifestation of this condition. However, brain tissue integrity in sites that regulate cognitive, autonomic, respiratory, and mood functions in CF patients is unclear. Our aim was to assess regional brain changes using high-resolution T1-weighted images based gray matter (GM) density and T2-relaxometry procedures in CF over control subjects.
We acquired high-resolution T1-weighted images and proton-density (PD) and T2-weighted images from 5 CF and 15 control subjects using a 3.0-Tesla MRI. High-resolution T1-weighted images were partitioned to GM-tissue type, normalized to a common space, and smoothed. Using PD- and T2-weighted images, whole-brain T2-relaxation maps were calculated, normalized, and smoothed. The smoothed GM-density and T2-relaxation maps were compared voxel-by-voxel between groups using analysis of covariance (covariates, age and sex; SPM12, p < 0.001).
Significantly increased GM-density, indicating tissues injury, emerged in multiple brain regions, including the cerebellum, hippocampus, amygdala, basal forebrain, insula, and frontal and prefrontal cortices. Various brain areas showed significantly reduced T2-relaxation values in CF subjects, indicating predominant acute tissue changes, in the cerebellum, cerebellar tonsil, prefrontal and frontal cortices, insula, and corpus callosum.
Cystic fibrosis subjects show predominant acute tissue changes in areas that control mood, cognition, respiratory, and autonomic functions and suggests that tissue changes may contribute to symptoms resulting from ongoing hypoxia accompanying the condition.
Adults undergoing lung transplant, as a lifesaving treatment for end stage lung disease, exhibit high levels of peri-operative neurocognitive dysfunction in multiple domains, including delirium, ...cognition, and autonomic deficits. These complications impact healthcare costs, quality of life, and patient outcomes. Post-operative symptoms likely result from loss of brain tissue integrity in sites mediating such regulatory functions. Our aim in this study was to examine peri-operative neurocognitive dysfunction and brain tissue changes after lung transplant in adults.
We retrospectively examined the UCLA lung transplant database to identify 114 lung transplant patients with pre-operative clinical and neurocognitive data. Of 114 patients, 9 lung transplant patients had pre- and post-transplant brain magnetic resonance imaging. Clinical and neurocognitive data were summarized for all subjects, and brain tissue volume changes, using T1-weighted images, before and after transplant were examined. T1-weighted images were partitioned into gray matter (GM)-tissue type, normalized to a common space, smoothed, and the smoothed GM-volume maps were compared between pre- and post-transplant (paired t-tests; covariate, age; SPM12,
< 0.005).
Increased comorbidities, including the diabetes mellitus (DM), hypertension, kidney disease, and sleep disordered breathing, as well as higher rates of neurocognitive dysfunction were observed in the lung transplant patients, with 41% experiencing post-operative delirium, 49% diagnosed with a mood disorder, and 25% of patients diagnosed with cognitive deficits, despite incomplete documentation. Similarly, high levels of delirium, cognitive dysfunction, and mood disorder were noted in a subset of patients used for brain MRI evaluation. Significantly decreased GM volumes emerged in multiple brain regions, including the frontal and prefrontal, parietal, temporal, bilateral anterior cingulate and insula, putamen, and cerebellar cortices.
Adults undergoing lung transplant often show significant pre-operative comorbidities, including diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and chronic kidney disease, as well as neurocognitive dysfunction. In addition, patients with lung transplant show significant brain tissue changes in regions that mediate cognition, autonomic, and mood functions. The findings indicate a brain structural basis for many enhanced post-operative symptoms and suggest a need for brain tissue protection in adults undergoing lung transplant to improve health outcomes.
Patients with epilepsy, who later succumb to sudden unexpected death, show altered brain tissue volumes in selected regions. It is unclear whether the alterations in brain tissue volume represent ...changes in neurons or glial properties, since volumetric procedures have limited sensitivity to assess the source of volume changes (e.g., neuronal loss or glial cell swelling). We assessed a measure, entropy, which can determine tissue homogeneity by evaluating tissue randomness, and thus, shows tissue integrity; the measure is easily calculated from T1-weighted images. T1-weighted images were collected with a 3.0-Tesla MRI from 53 patients with tonic-clonic (TC) seizures and 53 healthy controls; images were bias-corrected, entropy maps calculated, normalized to a common space, smoothed, and compared between groups (TC patients and controls using ANCOVA; covariates, age and sex; SPM12, family-wise error correction for multiple comparisons, p<0.01). Decreased entropy, indicative of increased tissue homogeneity, appeared in major autonomic (ventromedial prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, dorsal and ventral medulla, deep cerebellar nuclei), motor (sensory and motor cortex), or both motor and autonomic regulatory sites (basal-ganglia, ventral-basal cerebellum), and external surfaces of the pons. The anterior and posterior thalamus and midbrain also showed entropy declines. Only a few isolated regions showed increased entropy. Among the spared autonomic regions was the anterior cingulate and anterior insula; the posterior insula and cingulate were, however, affected. The entropy alterations overlapped areas of tissue changes found earlier with volumetric measures, but were more extensive, and indicate widespread injury to tissue within critical autonomic and breathing regulatory areas, as well as prominent damage to more-rostral sites that exert influences on both breathing and cardiovascular regulation. The entropy measures provide easily-collected supplementary information using only T1-weighted images, showing aspects of tissue integrity other than volume change that are important for assessing function.
Background:
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is accompanied by both gray and white matter differences in brain areas that regulate autonomic, cognitive, and mood functions, which are deficient in the ...condition. Such tissue changes have been examined through diffusion tensor and diffusion kurtosis imaging-based procedures. However, poor in-plane spatial resolution of these techniques precludes precise determination of the extent of tissue injury. Tissue texture maps derived from the ratio of T1-weighted and T2-weighted images can provide more adequate in-plane assessment of brain tissue differences.
Objectives:
To examine brain tissue integrity in recently diagnosed, treatment-naïve OSA subjects, relative to age- and sex-comparable control subjects using T1-weighted and T2-weighted images.
Design:
A cross-sectional study.
Methods:
We examined the extent of tissue changes in 106 OSA over 115 control subjects using high-resolution T1- and T2-weighted images collected from a 3.0-Tesla scanner (analysis of covariance; covariates: age, sex, body-mass-index, Pittsburgh sleep quality index, Epworth sleepiness scale, Beck Anxiety Inventory, and Beck Depression Inventory II; false discovery rate corrected; p < 0.01).
Results:
OSA subjects showed significantly lowered tissue integrity in several brain regions, including the frontal, cingulate and insular cortices, cingulum bundle, thalamus, corpus callosum, caudate and putamen, pons, temporal, occipital, and parietal sites, cerebellar peduncles, and medial medullary sites, compared with controls.
Conclusion:
OSA subjects show widespread lowered tissue integrity in autonomic, mood, and cognitive control sites over healthy controls. The pathological processes contributing to the alterations may include repetitive hypoxic and hypercarbic processes and excitotoxic injury, leading to altered brain tissue integrity in OSA.
Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging and computed tomography (CT) are used almost exclusively in radiation therapy planning of glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), despite their well-recognized limitations. MR ...spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) can identify biochemical patterns associated with normal brain and tumor, predominantly by observation of choline (Cho) and N-acetylaspartate (NAA) distributions. In this study, volumetric 3-dimensional MRSI was used to map these compounds over a wide region of the brain and to evaluate metabolite-defined treatment targets (metabolic tumor volumes MTV).
Volumetric MRSI with effective voxel size of ∼1.0 mL and standard clinical MR images were obtained from 19 GBM patients. Gross tumor volumes and edema were manually outlined, and clinical target volumes (CTVs) receiving 46 and 60 Gy were defined (CTV46 and CTV60, respectively). MTVCho and MTVNAA were constructed based on volumes with high Cho and low NAA relative to values estimated from normal-appearing tissue.
The MRSI coverage of the brain was between 70% and 76%. The MTVNAA were almost entirely contained within the edema, and the correlation between the 2 volumes was significant (r=0.68, P=.001). In contrast, a considerable fraction of MTVCho was outside of the edema (median, 33%) and for some patients it was also outside of the CTV46 and CTV60. These untreated volumes were greater than 10% for 7 patients (37%) in the study, and on average more than one-third (34.3%) of the MTVCho for these patients were outside of CTV60.
This study demonstrates the potential usefulness of whole-brain MRSI for radiation therapy planning of GBM and revealed that areas of metabolically active tumor are not covered by standard RT volumes. The described integration of MTV into the RT system will pave the way to future clinical trials investigating outcomes in patients treated based on metabolic information.
Introduction
Adolescents with single ventricle congenital heart disease (SVHD) show functional deficits, particularly in memory and mood regulation. Hippocampi are key brain structures that regulate ...mood and memory; however, their tissue integrity in SVHD is unclear. Our study aim is to evaluate hippocampal volumes and their associations with memory, anxiety, and mood scores in adolescents with SVHD compared to healthy controls.
Methods
We collected brain magnetic resonance imaging data from 25 SVHD (age 15.9 ± 1.2 years; 15 male) and 38 controls (16.0 ± 1.1 years; 19 male) and assessed memory (Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning 2, WRAML2), anxiety (Beck Anxiety Inventory, BAI), and mood (Patient Health Questionnaire 9, PHQ‐9) functions. Both left and right hippocampi were outlined and global volumes, as well as three‐dimensional surfaces were compared between groups using ANCOVA and associations with cognitive and behavioral scores with partial correlations (covariates: age and total brain volume).
Results
The SVHD group showed significantly higher BAI (p = .001) and PHQ‐9 (p < .001) scores, indicating anxiety and depression symptoms and significantly reduced WRAML2 scores (p < .001), suggesting memory deficits compared with controls. SVHD group had significantly reduced right global hippocampal volumes (p = .036) compared with controls, but not the left (p = .114). Right hippocampal volume reductions were localized in the CA1, CA4, subiculum, and dentate gyrus. Positive correlations emerged between WRAML2 scores and left (r = 0.32, p = .01) and right (r = 0.28, p = .03) hippocampal volumes, but BAI and PHQ‐9 did not show significant correlations.
Conclusion
Adolescents with SVHD show reduced hippocampal volumes, localized in several sites (CA1, CA4, subiculum, and dentate gyrus), which are associated with memory deficits. The findings indicate the need to explore ways to improve memory to optimize academic achievement and ability for self‐care in the condition.
Right hippocampal volume was significantly reduced in adolescents with SVHD compared to controls, localized in several sites (CA1, CA4, subiculum, and dentate gyrus), which are associated with memory deficits and trended toward significance in anxiety and mood.
Heart failure (HF) patients show brain injury in autonomic, affective, and cognitive sites, which can change resting-state functional connectivity (FC), potentially altering overall functional brain ...network organization. However, the status of such connectivity or functional organization is unknown in HF. Determination of that status was the aim here, and we examined region-to-region FC and brain network topological properties across the whole-brain in 27 HF patients compared to 53 controls with resting-state functional MRI procedures. Decreased FC in HF appeared between the caudate and cerebellar regions, olfactory and cerebellar sites, vermis and medial frontal regions, and precentral gyri and cerebellar areas. However, increased FC emerged between the middle frontal gyrus and sensorimotor areas, superior parietal gyrus and orbito/medial frontal regions, inferior temporal gyrus and lingual gyrus/cerebellar lobe/pallidum, fusiform gyrus and superior orbitofrontal gyrus and cerebellar sites, and within vermis and cerebellar areas; these connections were largely in the right hemisphere (p<0.005; 10,000 permutations). The topology of functional integration and specialized characteristics in HF are significantly changed in regions showing altered FC, an outcome which would interfere with brain network organization (p<0.05; 10,000 permutations). Brain dysfunction in HF extends to resting conditions, and autonomic, cognitive, and affective deficits may stem from altered FC and brain network organization that may contribute to higher morbidity and mortality in the condition. Our findings likely result from the prominent axonal and nuclear structural changes reported earlier in HF; protecting neural tissue may improve FC integrity, and thus, increase quality of life and reduce morbidity and mortality.
PDF
