As a relay in the fronto-subcortical circuits, the caudate subserves, and is potentially implicated in a number of neuropsychiatric conditions including stroke, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. This program began as an Australian-Swedish collaboration through Associate Professor Jeffrey Looi (Australian National University Medical School and The Canberra Hospital) and Professor Lars-Olof Wahlund (Karolinska Institute), established for the development of a manual tracing protocol for the caudate nucleus in neuropsychiatric research. The program studies the volumetrics and other imaging characteristics of the caudate in interdisciplinary collaborative studies across: Hospital Physics and Radiology, Karolinska University Hospital; SMILE; NEUROTEC Division of Psychiatry, Karolinska Institutet, Huddinge University Hospital, Karolinska Institute; Monash University; National University of Singapore; University of New South Wales; and, the Research Centre for the Neurosciences of Ageing, Australian National University Medical School. Research by Jeffrey Looi has been supported in part by the Canberra Hospital Specialists Private Practice Trust Fund over the last two years.

Collaborations (Stockholm based staff listed below):
• Post-traumatic stress disorder: Drs Göran Högberg, Dr Marco Pagani, Olof Lindberg, Dr Benny Liberg, Dr Yi Zhang, Lisa Botes, Leif Svensson, and Professor Wahlund.
• LADIS Project: Dr Gabriela Spulber, Dr Per Julin, Olof Lindberg, Lisa Botes, Leif Svensson, and Professor Wahlund.
• Frontotemporal lobar degeneration: Olof Lindberg, Per Östberg, Lisa Botes, Leif Svensson, and Professor Wahlund.

Other international collaborators include:
• Post-traumatic stress disorder: Dr Jerome Maller, Monash University.
• LADIS Project: Vanessa Tatham, ANU Medical School.
• Frontotemporal lobar degeneration: Bram Zandbelt.

Project leader: Jeffrey Looi

Cerebral and peripheral activation and reactivation in mentally disordered offenders.

Social interactions between people are complex and one important factor is emotional cognition. The emotional cognition includes the ability to recognize and interpret emotional face expressions but also to recognize and interpret one owns reactions when presented to different stimuli, the autonomous peripheral responses. Persons with lack of empathy may have disturbed emotional cognition. The hypothesis in this study is that different personality traits are closely connected with impairment in emotional cognition reflected by cerebral activity and periphery physiological arousal. This study is concentrating on two different groups of subjects, psychopathic respective autistic traits among violence offenders. To study activity in the brain we use fMRI and BOLD-technique and to measure physiological arousal we use skin conductance response, SCR.
Project leaders: Marianne Kristiansson and Katarina Wahlund

fMRI analysis of brain activity during distal motor stimulation: reproducibility in a task demand monitored by a data glove.

In this study we are investigating the reproducibility in combining two relatively new techniques; registration of distal motor performance by applying a data glove in combination with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), to register corresponding activated areas in the brain. The method is intended for use in a prospective stroke study.
Project leaders: Ulla Bergfeldt, Per Julin

Focal spasticity therapy: effects on motor functions, quality of life, and central nervous system plasticity.

In patients with brain injuries spasticity is an important mechanistic factor causing symptoms related to motor dysfunction, pain contractures etc. Focal spasticity therapy with intramuscular injections with botulinum toxin in combination with physical therapy and orthoses, has emerged as one important approach to alleviate such symptoms.
This is a controlled explorative study, involving 9 controls and 6 stroke patients. Functional MRI and a Virtual Reality data-glove, sensitive to detect finger movements are being used, as well as traditional functional tests and QoL assessment for therapy efficacy. However, the ability of fMRI to detect clinically significant changes in CNS activity related to such motor activity and its improvement following spasticity therapy has previously not been defined. The first step was therefore to apply fMRI in healthy individuals to characterize the response to and reproducibility (reliability) of a standardized right hand motor activity monitored by a data-glove.
Project leaders: Ulla Bergfeldt, Per Julin

Functional connectivity in affective disorder with psychomotor retardation before and after ECT.

Dr Björn Wahlund's group studies motor function in psychiatric patients. The general level of activityin patients has proved a continuous variable in multivariate investigations of affective disorders and it may display as motor disturbances in a clinical setting. We assess motor function through anexperimental design that converges several imaging techniques (MRI, MRS, fMRI and DTI), neurophysiology (EEG), technical engineering and clinical psychiatry (ECT). We aim at developing ananalysis of the biostochastical processes and non-linear events that underpin certain aspects of affective disorders. We work in tight conjunction with the Departments of Mathematical Statistics and Theoretical Physics at SLU in Uppsala, and our work combines expertise from biomathematics, computational neuroscience and clinical psychiatry. Our goal is to understand the dynamics offunctional integration in affective disorders.
Project leader: Björn Wahlund

In vivo neuroimaging biomarkers for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.

The objective of this project is to develop functionalized in vivo contrasts agents for non-invasive molecular imaging in diagnosis and therapy of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques. More over, compounding novel biomarkers with anatomical and functional dysfunctions of the brain, blood flow, blood volume, diffusion and perfusion examination or metabolic defedts might enhance the accuracy of the prediction and of AD.
Project leader: Ivan Bednar

Neuroprotective effects of the cholinergic tretment.

Donepezil improve cognitive functions in AD patients. Plasma levels of donepezil can be correlated with the degree of cognitive improvement. Recently, it has been reported that donepezil has a beneficial effect on both N-acetyl-L-aspartate (NAA), a neuronal marker, and on brain structure in humans (Krishnan et al., 2003). As described in this study, a donepezil treatment resulted in a smaller decrease in hippocampal volume in AD patients in comparison to patients treated with placebo. It is unclear how this effect was mediated and it is warrant to investigate the mechanisms underlying this phenomena.
Project leader: Ivan Bednar

SNACK diffusion

Within the SNACK-project, 550 subjects above 65 years old were selected to undergo an MRI-investigation. A diffusion tensor image (DTI) sequence was included in the MRI. From this material the normal diffusion for an older population can be secluded. Also, T1 lesions can be compared with diffusion tensor images to see if DTI can give extra information. Project leaders: Lars-Olof Wahlund, Anders Frank

The PEDAL project

SPECT CBF images will be quantativley compared to MRI perfusion images of the same subject. This will be done by, for instance, voxel to voxel based comparisons, visual estimations and region based comparisons. The aim is to see if MRI perfusion can replace SPECT in diagnosing dementia. Project leaders: Lars-Olof Wahlund, Anders Frank, Leif Svensson, Per Julin.

Diffusion study of SNACK subjects using histogram analysis

With objective to improve our understanding of age-related changes in the human brain, an MRI study including various sequences was performed on 550 subjects above 65 years old. The Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) sequence provides information of the capacity of brain tissues to restrict diffusion of water molecules. Comparisons of Fractional Anisotropy (FA) and Mean Diffusivity (MD) of the subjects, when grouped according to age, are performed by histogram analysis.
Involved in project: Elin Lundström, Anders Frank

Software links

FSL is a comprehensive library of functional and structural brain image analysis tools:http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/
FMRIB - Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford: http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/

Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) refers to the construction and assessment of spatially extended statistical process used to test hypotheses about [neuro]imaging data from SPECT/PET & fMRI: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/
SPM documentation: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/dox.html#Papers
Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Functional Imaging Laboratory, Queen Square, LONDON: http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/

Free surfer is a set of semi-automated tools for reconstruction of the brain’s cortical surface and overlay of functional data onto the reconstructed surface: http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/

MRIcro, By Chris Rorden, is a program that converts images to SPM friendly Analyze format. It can also view images in many different formats, export images to BMP, JPEG, PNG or TIF format, and much more: http://www.cla.sc.edu/psyc/faculty/rorden/mricro.html

BrainVoyager is a powerful fMRI analysis and visualization software: http://www.brainvoyager.com

AFNI is a set of C programs for processing, analyzing and displaying functional MRI (fMRI) data - a technique for mapping human brain activity: http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/old/afni/index.shtml