Posts tagged neuroscience
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Using bioluminescent proteins from a jellyfish, a team of scientists has lit up the inside of a neuron, capturing spectacular video footage that shows the movement of proteins throughout the cell.
(Source: medicalxpress.com)
With his knack for knowing what stem cells want, Yoshiki Sasai has grown an eye and parts of a brain in a dish.
All it took to grow a retina, it turned out, were a few tweaks, such as a reduction in the concentration of growth factors and the addition of a standard cell-culture ingredient called Matrigel. The result closely mimics eye development in the embryo. By the sixth day in culture, the brain balls start sprouting balloon-like growths of retinal cells, which then collapse in on themselves to make the double-walled optic cups. Sasai’s team snip them off — “like taking an apple from a tree”, says Sasai — transfer them to a different culture and let them be. Two weeks later, the cups have formed all six layers of the retina, an architecture that resembles the eye of an 8-day-old mouse (which, at that age, is still blind). That the cells could drive themselves through this dramatic biomechanical process without surrounding tissues to support them stunned Sasai as much as anyone else. “When I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ Shape, topology and size are all recapitulated,” he says. Carefully explaining the pun to come, he adds: “In English, when you are surprised, you say ‘eye-popping’ — so we really thought this was eye-popping.”
(Source: nature.com)
Watson turns medic: Supercomputer to diagnose disease
22 August 2012 by Jim Giles
More than a year after it won the quiz show Jeopardy!, IBM’s supercomputer is learning how to help doctors diagnose patients
IT IS more than a year since Watson, IBM’s famous supercomputer, opened a new frontier for artificial intelligence by beating human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy!. Now Watson is learning to use its language skills to help doctors diagnose patients.
Progress is most advanced in cancer care, where IBM is working with several US hospitals to build a virtual physicians’ assistant. “It’s a machine that can read everything and forget nothing,” says Larry Norton, a doctor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who is collaborating with IBM.
When playing Jeopardy!, Watson analysed each question in a bid to guess what it was about. Then it looked for possible answers in its database, made up of sources such as encyclopaedias, scoring each according to the evidence associated with it and answering with the highest rated answer. The system takes a similar approach when dealing with medical questions, although in this case it draws on information from medical journals and clinical guidelines.
To test the system, Watson was first tasked with answering questions taken from Doctor’s Dilemma, a competition for trainee doctors that takes place at the annual meeting of the American College of Physicians. Watson was given 188 questions that it had not seen before and achieved around 50 per cent accuracy - not bad for an early test, but hardly ideal (Artificial Intelligence, doi.org/h6m).
To improve, Watson is now absorbing records - tens of thousands at Sloan-Kettering alone - of treatments and outcomes associated with individual patients. Given data on a new patient, Watson looks for information on those with similar symptoms, as well as the treatments that have been the most successful. The idea is it will give doctors a range of possible diagnoses and treatment options, each with an associated level of confidence. The result will be a system that its creators say can suggest nuanced treatment plans that take into account factors like drug interactions and a patient’s medical history.
William Audeh, a doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who is working with IBM, says the last few months have involved “filling Watson’s brain” with medical data. Watson is answering basic questions based on the treatment guidelines that are published by medical societies and is showing “very positive” results, he adds.
The technology is particularly useful in oncology because doctors struggle to keep up with the explosion of genomic and molecular data generated about each cancer type. This means it can take years for findings to translate into medical practice. By contrast, Watson can absorb new results and relay them to doctors quickly, together with an estimate of their potential usefulness. “Watson really has great potential,” says Audeh. “Cancer needs it most because it’s becoming so complicated so quickly.”
The IBM system could also approve treatment requests more quickly. At WellPoint, one of the largest insurers in the US, nurses use guidelines and patient history to determine if a request is in line with company policy. Nurses are now training Watson by feeding it test requests and observing the answers. Progress is good and the system could be deployed next year, says WellPoint’s Cindy Wakefield. “Now it can take up to a couple of days,” she says. “We hope Watson can return the accurate recommendation in a matter of minutes.”
Source: NewScientist
Humanoid Robots ‘Mobot’ and ‘Usain Volt’, from Plymouth University, at the FIRA Roboworld Cup
(Source: Daily Mail)
Necomimi feature NeuroSky’s brain-computer interface technology to control the motion of the cat ears. The latest product sporting the company’s brainwave-reading technology features a slightly more fun form factor – fluffy, wearable cat ears that move in response to the wearer’s emotional state.
NICO spends a lot of time looking in the mirror. But it’s not mere vanity - Nico is a humanoid robot that can recognise its reflection - a step on the path towards true self-awareness.
Nico is the centrepiece of a unique experiment to see whether a robot can tackle a classic test of self-awareness called the mirror test. What does it take to pass the test? An animal (usually) has to recognise that a mark on the body it sees in the mirror is in fact on its own body. Only dolphins, orcas, elephants, magpies, humans and a few other apes have passed the test so far.
(Image: Justin Hart/Yale University)
Researchers at the University of Iowa studied the brain of a patient with rare, severe damage to three regions long considered integral to self-awareness in humans (from left to right: the insular cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex). Based on the scans, the UI team believes self-awareness is a product of a diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain rather than confined to specific areas.
Stem Cell Trial for Autism Launches in U.S.
August 21, 2012
Stem cell treatment could lower inflammation levels and demonstrate whether autism is an autoimmune disease
Image: Nature News
Families with autistic children must navigate a condition where questions outnumber the answers, and therapies remain sparse and largely ineffective. A clinical trial being conducted by the Sutter Neuroscience Institute in Sacramento, California to address this situation began recruiting participants today for a highly experimental stem cell therapy for autism. The institute plans to find 30 autistic children between ages 2 and 7 with cord blood banked at the privately-run Cord Blood Registry, located about 100 miles west of the institute. Already one other clinical trial, with 37 total participants between ages 3 and 12 years old, has been completed in China. The researchers affiliated with Beike Biotechnology in Shenzhen, the firm that sponsored the study, have not yet published any papers from that the trial, which used stem cells from donated cord blood. Mexican researchers are currently recruiting kids for yet another type of autism stem cell trial that will harvest cells from the participant’s fat tissue.
But for each of these officially registered trials, many more undocumented stem cell therapy treatments take place for clients who are willing to pay enough. “Our research is important because many people are going to foreign countries and spending a lot of money on therapy that may not be valid,” says Michael Chez, a pediatric neurologist and lead investigator of the study at Sutter.
A major difference between the Sutter trial and those in China is that his will use the child’s own stem cells, rather than those from a donor. Chez hypothesizes that one way autologous stem cell infusion might work is by reducing inflammation within the body’s immune system. This would answer previous research that suggests that autism may be an autoimmune disease. “One of our exploratory goals will be to look at inflammatory markers in cells,” he says.
The study’s primary goal, however, will be assessing changes in patients’ speaking and understanding of vocabulary. For each individual, researchers will create a baseline benchmark that establishes current skill levels. The group will be evenly divided, with one initially receiving an infusion of their own, unmodified cord blood stem cells and the other a placebo treatment of saline injection. Six months later, all of the children will be tested on their ability to comprehend and form words. The groups will then be switched. In the course of the 13-month-long study, both groups will receive only one stem cell therapy infusion.
Not all stem cell scientists who study neurodevelopmental diseases are ready to invest great hope that the autism stem cell trial will succeed. “I wish I could tell you I’m optimistic about the end results,” says James Carroll, a pediatric neurologist at the Georgia Health Sciences University in Augusta who began a clinical trial two years ago to better understand how stem cell therapy affects patients with cerebral palsy. “But so far we have not seen any kind of miraculous recovery in our cerebral palsy patients. I would be delighted if that changes.”
Members in the stem cell therapy patient community think Chez will have no shortage of volunteers for the trial. Jeremy Lowey, who lives in Sacramento and has struggled with a rare condition known as non-verbal learning disorder, arranged for his own stem cell therapy treatment in India last year, which he called life-changing. He receives numerous Facebook requests from parents of autistic children who are curious to know more. He always begins his conversations by saying, “Go slowly and think hard about your decision.”
Source: Scientific American
Patient Suffers Severe Amnesia but Musical Memory Remains Intact
ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2012) — Together with his team, Prof. Christoph Ploner, director of the Department of Neurology at the Virchow campus, examined a professional cellist who suffered from encephalitis caused by a herpes virus. As a result of the inflammation, the patient developed serious disturbances in memory.
Both his memory for the past (retrograde amnesia), as well as the acquisition of new information (anterograde amnesia) were affected. Whereas the patient was unable to recount any events from his private or professional life, or remember any of his friends or relatives, he retained a completely intact musical memory. Furthermore, he was still able to sight-read and play the cello.
For the systematic examination of his musical memory, Dr. Carsten Finke, Nazli Esfahani and Prof. Christoph Ploner developed various tests that take the beginning of his amnesia into account. In comparison to amateur musicians and professional musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic, the patient showed a normal musical memory in all tests. He not only remembered music pieces from the past, but was also able to retain music he had never heard before.
"The findings show that musical memory is organized at least partially independent of the hippocampus, a brain structure that is central to memory formation," says Carsten Finke, the primary author of the study. "It is possible that the enormous significance of music throughout all times and in all cultures contributed to the development of an independent memory for music."
Carsten Finke and his colleagues hope that the intact musical memory in patients with amnesia can be used to stimulate other memory content. In this way, perhaps a particular melody can be connected to a person or an everyday task, for example taking medicine.
Source: Science Daily
MRI Findings Shed Light On Multiple Sclerosis
ScienceDaily (Aug. 21, 2012) — New magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) research shows that changes in brain blood flow associated with vein abnormalities are not specific for multiple sclerosis (MS) and do not contribute to its severity, despite what some researchers have speculated. Results of the research are published online in the journal Radiology.
"MRI allowed an accurate evaluation of cerebral blood flow that was crucial for our results," said Simone Marziali, M.D., from the Department of Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Rome.
MS is a disease of the central nervous system in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves. There are different types of MS, and symptoms and severity vary widely. Recent reports suggest a highly significant association between MS and chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI), a condition characterized by compromised blood flow in the veins that drain blood from the brain. This strong correlation has generated substantial attention from the scientific community and the media in recent years, raising the possibility that MS can be treated with endovascular procedures like stent placement. However, the role of brain blood flow alterations on MS patients is still unclear.
To investigate this further, Italian researchers compared brain blood flow in 39 MS patients and 26 healthy control participants. Twenty-five of the MS patients and 14 of the healthy controls were positive for CCSVI, based on Color-Doppler-Ultrasound (CDU) findings. The researchers used dynamic susceptibility contrast-enhanced (DSC) MRI to assess blood flow in the brains of the study groups. DSC MR imaging offers more accurate assessment of brain blood flow than that of CDU. MRI and CDU were used to assess two different anatomical structures.
While CCSVI-positive patients showed decreased cerebral blood flow and volume compared with their CCSVI-negative counterparts, there was no significant interaction between MS and CCSVI for any of the blood flow parameters. Furthermore, the researchers did not find any correlation between the cerebral blood flow and volume in the brain’s white matter and the severity of disability in MS patients.
The results suggest that CCSVI is not a pathological condition correlated with MS, according to Dr. Marziali, but probably just an epiphenomenon — an accessory process occurring in the course of a disease that is not necessarily related to the disease. This determination is important because, to date, studies of the prevalence of CCSVI in MS patients have provided inconclusive results.
"This study clearly demonstrates the important role of MRI in defining and understanding the causes of MS," Dr. Marziali said. "I believe that, in the future, it will be necessary to use powerful and advanced diagnostic tools to obtain a better understanding of this and other diseases still under study."
Source: Science Daily