The Basal Ganglia comprise a group of forebrain nuclei which are interconnected with the cerebral cortex, thalamus and brainstem. Basal ganglia circuits are involved in various functions, including motor control, cognition, and mnemonic functions, and the importance of these nuclei for normal brain function and behavior is emphasized by the numerous disorders associated with basal ganglia dysfunction - Parkinson's, Tourette's, Huntington's, cerebral palsy, ADHD, OCD, and others. the Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the structural and functional organization of the basal ganglia, w

Handbook of Basal Ganglia Structure and Function, Second Edition, offers an integrated overview of the structural and functional aspects of the basal ganglia, highlighting clinical relevance. The basal ganglia, a group of forebrain nuclei interconnected with the cerebral cortex, thalamus, and brainstem, are involved in numerous brain functions, such as motor control and learning, sensorimotor integration, reward, and cognition. These nuclei are essential for normal brain function and behavior, and their importance is further emphasized by the numerous and diverse disorders associated with basal ganglia dysfunction, including Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, Huntington's disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dystonia, and psychostimulant addiction. This updated edition has been thoroughly revised to provide the most up-to-date account of this critical brain structure. Edited and authored by internationally acclaimed basal ganglia researchers, the new edition contains ten entirely new chapters that offer expanded coverage of anatomy and physiology, detailed accounts of recent advances in cellular/molecular mechanisms and cellular/physiological mechanisms, and critical, deeper insights into the behavioral and clinical aspects of basal ganglia function and dysfunction. - Synthesizes widely dispersed information on the behavioral neurobiology of the basal ganglia, including advances in the understanding of anatomy, cellular/molecular and cellular/physiological mechanisms, and behavioral and clinical aspects of function and dysfunction - Written by international authors who are preeminent researchers in the field - Explores, in full, the clinically relevant impact of the basal ganglia on various psychiatric and neurological diseases

This groundbreaking text takes current knowledge of the basal ganglia far from well-known motor-based models to a more inclusive understanding of deep-brain structure and function. Synthesizing diverse perspectives from across the brain-behavioral sciences, it tours the neuroanatomy and circuitry of the basal ganglia, linking their organization to their controlling functions in core cognitive, behavioral, and motor areas, both normative and disordered. Interactions between the basal ganglia and major structures of the brain are identified in their contributions to a diverse range of processes, from language processing to decision-making, emotion to visual perception, motivation to intent. And the basal ganglia are intimately involved in the mechanisms of dysfunction, as evinced by chapters on dyskinesia, Parkinson’s disease, neuropsychiatric conditions, and addictions. Included in the coverage: Limbic-basal ganglia circuits: parallel and integrative aspects. Dopamine and its actions in the basal ganglia system. Cerebellar-basal ganglia interactions. The basal ganglia contribution to controlled and automatic processing. The basal ganglia and decision making in neuropsychiatric disorders. The circuitry underlying the reinstatement of cocaine seeking: modulation by deep brain stimulation. The basal ganglia and hierarchical control in voluntary behavior. Its breadth and depth of scholarship and data should make The Basal Ganglia a work of great interest to cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, neuropsychiatrists, and speech-language pathologists.

In order to focus on principles, each chapter in this work is brief, organized around 1-3 wiring diagrams of the key circuits, with several pages of text that distil the functional significance of each microcircuit

In Neural Organization, Arbib, Erdi, and Szentagothai integrate structural, functional, and dynamical approaches to the interaction of brain models and neurobiologcal experiments. Both structure-based "bottom-up" and function- based "top-down" models offer coherent concepts by which to evaluate the experimental data. The goal of this book is to point out the advantages of a multidisciplinary, multistrategied approach to the brain.Part I of Neural Organization provides a detailed introduction to each of the three areas of structure, function, and dynamics. Structure refers to the anatomical aspects of the brain and the relations between different brain regions. Function refers to skills and behaviors, which are explained by means of functional schemas and biologically based neural networks. Dynamics refers to the use of a mathematical framework to analyze the temporal change of neural activities and synaptic connectivities that underlie brain development and plasticity--in terms of both detailed single-cell models and large-scale network models.In part II, the authors show how their systematic approach can be used to analyze specific parts of the nervous system--the olfactory system, hippocampus, thalamus, cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and basal ganglia--as well as to integrate data from the study of brain regions, functional models, and the dynamics of neural networks. In conclusion, they offer a plan for the use of their methods in the development of cognitive neuroscience."

With the advancements of semantic web, ontology has become the crucial mechanism for representing concepts in various domains. For research and dispersal of customized healthcare services, a major challenge is to efficiently retrieve and analyze individual patient data from a large volume of heterogeneous data over a long time span. This requirement demands effective ontology-based information retrieval approaches for clinical information systems so that the pertinent information can be mined from large amount of distributed data. This unique and groundbreaking book highlights the key advances in ontology-based information retrieval techniques being applied in the healthcare domain and covers the following areas: Semantic data integration in e-health care systems Keyword-based medical information retrieval Ontology-based query retrieval support for e-health implementation Ontologies as a database management system technology for medical information retrieval Information integration using contextual knowledge and ontology merging Collaborative ontology-based information indexing and retrieval in health informatics An ontology-based text mining framework for vulnerability assessment in health and social care An ontology-based multi-agent system for matchmaking patient healthcare monitoring A multi-agent system for querying heterogeneous data sources with ontologies for reducing cost of customized healthcare systems A methodology for ontology based multi agent systems development Ontology based systems for clinical systems: validity, ethics and regulation

This second edition presents the enormous progress made in recent years in the many subfields related to the two great questions : how does the brain work? and, How can we build intelligent machines? This second edition greatly increases the coverage of models of fundamental neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, and neural network approaches to language. (Midwest).

This practical guide to the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases discusses modern molecular techniques, morphological classification, fundamentals of clinical symptomology, diagnostic pitfalls and immunostaining protocols. It is based on the proteinopathy concept of neurodegenerative disease, which has influenced classification and provides new strategies for therapy. Numerous high-quality images, including histopathology photomicrographs and neuroradiology scans, accompany the description of morphologic alterations and interpretation of immunoreactivities. Diagnostic methods and criteria are placed within recent developments in neuropathology, including the now widespread application of immunohistochemistry. To aid daily practice, the guide includes diagnostic algorithms and offers personal insights from experienced experts in the field. Special focus is given to the way brain tissue should be handled during diagnosis. This is a must-have reference for medical specialists and specialist medical trainees in the fields of pathology, neuropathology and neurology working with neuropathologic features of neurodegenerative diseases.

This handbook describes methods for processing and analyzing functional connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fcMRI) data using the CONN toolbox, a popular freely-available functional connectivity analysis software. Content description [excerpt from introduction] The first section (fMRI minimal preprocessing pipeline) describes standard and advanced preprocessing steps in fcMRI. These steps are aimed at correcting or minimizing the influence of well-known factors affecting the quality of functional and anatomical MRI data, including effects arising from subject motion within the scanner, temporal and spatial image distortions due to the sequential nature of the scanning acquisition protocol, and inhomogeneities in the scanner magnetic field, as well as anatomical differences among subjects. Even after these conventional preprocessing steps, the measured blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal often still contains a considerable amount of noise from a combination of physiological effects, outliers, and residual subject-motion factors. If unaccounted for, these factors would introduce very strong and noticeable biases in all functional connectivity measures. The second section (fMRI denoising pipeline) describes standard and advanced denoising procedures in CONN that are used to characterize and remove the effect of these residual non-neural noise sources. Functional connectivity Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies attempt to quantify the level of functional integration across different brain areas. The third section (functional connectivity measures) describes a representative set of functional connectivity measures available in CONN, each focusing on different indicators of functional integration, including seed-based connectivity measures, ROI-to-ROI measures, graph theoretical approaches, network-based measures, and dynamic connectivity measures. Second-level analyses allow researchers to make inferences about properties of groups or populations, by generalizing from the observations of only a subset of subjects in a study. The fourth section (General Linear Model) describes the mathematics behind the General Linear Model (GLM), the approach used in CONN for all second-level analyses of functional connectivity measures. The description includes GLM model definition, parameter estimation, and hypothesis testing framework, as well as several practical examples and general guidelines aimed at helping researchers use this method to answer their specific research questions. The last section (cluster-level inferences) details several approaches implemented in CONN that allow researchers to make meaningful inferences from their second-level analysis results while providing appropriate family-wise error control (FWEC), whether in the context of voxel-based measures, such as when studying properties of seed-based maps across multiple subjects, or in the context of ROI-to-ROI measures, such as when studying properties of ROI-to-ROI connectivity matrices across multiple subjects.

This monograph describes the progress in neuropathological HD research made during the last century, the neuropathological hallmarks of HD and their pathogenic relevance. Starting with the initial descriptions of the progressive degeneration of the striatum as one of the key events in HD, the worldwide practiced Vonsattel HD grading system of striatal neurodegeneration will be outlined. Correlating neuropathological data with results on the functional neuroanatomy of the human brain, subsequent chapters will highlight recent HD findings: the neuronal loss in the cerebral neo-and allocortex, the neurodegeneration of select thalamic nuclei, the affection of the cerebellar cortex and nuclei, the involvement of select brainstem nuclei, as well as the pathophysiological relevance of these pathologies for the clinical picture of HD. Finally, the potential pathophysiological role of neuronal huntingtin aggregations and the most important and enduring challenges of neuropathological HD research are discussed.