Dr Oscar Peña passed yesterday his PhD with flying colours (despite some connection issues). The Thesis dissertation is entitled “Optimized acquisition and estimation techniques in diffusion MRI for quantitative imaging”. Thanks so much to the external examiners and welcome Oscar to the dark side of the post-PhD life.
The LPI, in collaboration with the Headache Units of Hospital Universitario de la Princesa (Madrid), Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valladolid and Hospital Clínico Universitario Lozano Blesa (Zaragoza), has contributed to the assessment of the clinical course of migraine during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Approximately half of the migraine patients who participated in the study reported worsening of their usual pain during the COVID-19 lockdown. The emotional impact of the lockdown and changes in the migraine triggers worsened the clinical course of migraine.
The article is available here (Open Access): https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/advance-article/doi/10.1093/pm/pnaa449/6154429
The cover image of the latest issue of Human Brain Mapping (March 2021) is related to the LPI article "Multimodal fusion analysis of structural connectivity and gray matter morphology in migraine".
Link to the cover image: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25054
Link to the article (Open Access): https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25267
The International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on 11 February, is an opportunity to promote full and equal access to science for women and girls. The challenge is getting more women working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Diversity in research brings in fresh perspectives, talent and creativity.
This Day is a reminder that women and girls play a critical role in science and technology communities and that their participation should be strengthened.
LPI adheres to this initiative and, especially today, highlights the work of its women researchers.
Members of the LPI, in collaboratation with the Headache Units of the Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valladolid and the Hospital Clínico San Carlos (Madrid), have characterized diverse phenotypes of headache attributed to COVID-19. A phenotype with migraine characteristics and another one with tension-type headache features were found. Moreover, a possible third "COVID-19 specific" phenotype was hypothesized, possibly related to anosmia. The full paper published in Frontiers in Neurology can be found here (Open Access): https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2020.583870/full
A paper about simultaneous analysis of features from different MRI modalities entitled Multimodal fusion analysis of structural connectivity and gray matter morphology in migraine has been published in Human Brain Mapping. This article has been written by Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez, Santiago Aja-Fernández and Rodrigo de Luis-García, in collaboration with the Headache Unit and the Department of Radiology of the Clinical Hospital of Valladolid. The methodology of this research allowed to assess the associated changes between specific features with no need of descriptor maps. Regarding migraine biomarkers, strengthened connections with pain processing regions and weakened connections within each lobe were identified in both groups of migraine patients. The article is available (Open Access) here: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25267
This year we had to have our Christmas gathering via Webex. Let us hope next year we meet in a real dinner.
Do you want to estimate advance diffusion features, time-efficiently and accurately? With 2 shells and a couple of minutes, MiSFIT can do the magic. The paper entitled "Efficient and accurate EAP imaging from multi-shell dMRI with Micro-Structure adaptive convolution kernels and dual Fourier Integral Transforms (MiSFIT)" has been accepted in Neuroimage. Great work about white matter directly from Antonio's gray matter. You can downloaded from [here]. Source code with examples available [here].
A new paper entitled Apparent propagator anisotropy from single‐shell diffusion MRI acquisitions has been published in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. The work is written by members of the LPI (Santiago Aja-Fernández, Antonio Tristán-Vega) in collaboration with CUBRIC, University of Cardiff, UK (D.K. Jones). In the work, we propose a method to effectively calculate apparent Propagator Anisotropy (APA) from single shell diffusion MRI. The method avoids the calculation of the whole EAP by assuming the diffusion anisotropy is roughly independent from the radial direction. With such an assumption we achieve closed-form expressions for the measures using information from one single shell. At the same time, the closed forms provided make the method computationally efficient and robust.
A paper about the assessment of gray matter morphometry parameters in migraine patients, Gray Matter Structural Alterations in Chronic and Episodic Migraine: A Morphometric Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, has been published in Pain Medicine. This article has been written by Álvaro Planchuelo-Gómez, Santiago Aja-Fernández and Rodrigo de Luis-García, in collaboration with the Headache Unit and the Department of Radiology of the Clinical Hospital of Valladolid. The findings of this research suggest that there are widespread gray matter alterations in migraine. Chronic migraine would be a distinct entity with respect to a high frequency episodic migraine and the surface area would be a proper biomarker to identify it. The results of this study suggest that the pattern of differences between healthy controls and episodic migraine patients is qualitatively different from that occurring between episodic and chronic migraine patients. The article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnaa271