Publications by authors named "Matthew A Howard"

Understanding healthy human brain function is crucial to identify and map pathological tissue within it. Whilst previous studies have mapped intracranial EEG (icEEG) from non-epileptogenic brain regions, they often neglect age and sex effects. Further, they are limited by small sample sizes due to the modality's invasive nature.

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Hippocampal activity supports memory and many other brain functions. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) guided by hippocampal functional connectivity (FC) shows promise in improving memory, but direct neural evidence of its capacity to engage and modulate hippocampal activity is lacking. Here we combined TMS with intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) in 8 neurosurgical patients and with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 79 neurologically healthy participants.

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BackgroundDecompressive craniectomy (DC) is a venerable clinical tool to manage moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The utility of recently approved neuroinflammatory biomarkers glial fibrillary acidic protein () and ubiquitin C-terminal hydrolase-L1 () is unclear in DC patients as does the timing of cranioplasty to repair/restore the missing cranial bone. We hypothesize that DC diminishes acute neuroinflammatory biomarkers and and that early cranioplasty improves motor recovery following DC in moderate-to-severe TBI.

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Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) has been a cornerstone in managing chronic pain since the late 1960s. However, traditional SCS is often associated with variable efficacy and side effects, driving the development of advanced techniques like high-frequency SCS (hSCS). Previous studies have demonstrated that the power of high-frequency cerebral oscillations increases as a function of stimulus intensity and plays a critical role in local neural processing of peripheral sensory stimuli.

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The ability to retrieve a single episode encountered just once is a hallmark of human intelligence and episodic memory[1]. Yet, decoding a specific memory from neuronal activity in the human brain remains a formidable challenge. Here, we develop a transformer neural network model[2, 3] trained on neuronal spikes from intracranial microelectrodes recorded during a single viewing of an audiovisual episode.

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Photobiomodulation (PBM), a noninvasive therapy using red and near-infrared light, has shown promising benefits in neuropathology. However, the transmission of PBM to the central nervous system through the scalp's soft tissues and skull is unknown. We hypothesize that decompressive craniectomy (DC) for moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) improves PBM penetrance and enhances neurorehabilitation.

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Objective: Peri-odontoid calcium pyrophosphate dihydrate deposition (CPPD) results in extradural masses that compress the cervicomedullary junction (CMJ). The authors analyzed their experience in the MRI era to understand causation, radiographic pathology, treatment options, and outcome.

Methods: Retrospective analysis of University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics records of retro-odontoid masses consistent with diagnosis of CPPD was made.

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Background: Postoperative delirium may be mediated by systemic inflammation and neuroinflammation. By inhibiting the proinflammatory actions of plasmin, tranexamic acid (TXA) may decrease postoperative delirium. To explore this hypothesis, we modified an ongoing randomised trial of TXA on blood loss, adding measures of delirium, cognition, systemic inflammation, and astrocyte activation.

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The insula is critical for integrating sensory information from the body with that arising from the environment. Although previous studies suggest that posterior insula is sensitive to sounds, auditory response properties of insula neurons have not previously been reported. Here, we provide the first report of a population of human single neuron data from the insula and provide comparative data from the primary auditory cortex, recorded intracranially from human participants during passive listening.

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Introduction: Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a prevalent and debilitating condition. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can improve coping mechanisms for CLBP and pain-related outcomes. However, the mechanisms by which they do so remain undetermined.

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Intracranial EEG was recorded during a dialog-based task in a 16-year-old boy with a left insular ganglioglioma, medically intractable epilepsy, epileptic foci in auditory cortex on the lateral superior temporal gyrus (STG) and language deficiencies. Performance of the task was highly erratic, characterized by rapid cycling between providing correct answers, incorrect answers and failure to respond. There was no relationship between performance and the degree of concurrent epileptic activity in auditory cortex.

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Electrical-stimulation fMRI (es-fMRI) combines direct stimulation of the brain via implanted electrodes with simultaneous rapid functional magnetic resonance imaging of the evoked response. Widely used to map effective functional connectivity in animal studies, its application to the human brain has been limited due to safety concerns. In particular, the method requires reliable prediction and minimization of local tissue heating close to the electrodes, which will vary with imaging parameters and hardware configurations.

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the spinal cord is relevant for studying sensation, movement, and autonomic function. Preprocessing of spinal cord fMRI data involves segmentation of the spinal cord on gradient-echo echo planar imaging (EPI) images. Current automated segmentation methods do not work well on these data, due to the low spatial resolution, susceptibility artifacts causing distortions and signal drop-out, ghosting, and motion-related artifacts.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers have created a new mouse model that mimics chronic hydrocephalus with normal pressure, displaying similar symptoms to human NPH, including unsteady gait and subtle learning difficulties.
  • * This model allows scientists to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of NPH symptoms using advanced genetic techniques, potentially leading to new treatments.
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Background: Postoperative delirium may be mediated by perioperative systemic- and neuro-inflammation. By inhibiting the pro-inflammatory actions of plasmin, tranexamic acid (TXA) may decrease postoperative delirium. To explore this hypothesis, we modified an ongoing randomised trial of TXA, adding measures of postoperative delirium, cognitive function, systemic cytokines, and astrocyte activation.

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Temporal lobe epilepsy surgery is an effective treatment option for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. However, neurosurgery poses a risk for cognitive deficits-up to one-third of patients have a decline in naming ability following temporal lobe surgery. In this study, we aimed to better understand the neural correlates associated with reduced naming performance after temporal lobe surgery, with the goal of informing surgical planning strategies to mitigate the risk of dysnomia.

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Laser thermal ablation has become a prominent neurosurgical treatment approach, but in epilepsy patients it cannot currently be safely implemented with intracranial recording electrodes that are used to study interictal or epileptiform activity. There is a pressing need for computational models of laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) with and without intracranial electrodes to enhance the efficacy and safety of optical neurotherapies. In this paper, we aimed to build a biophysical bioheat and ray optics model to study the effects of laser heating in the brain, with and without intracranial electrodes in the vicinity of the ablation zone during the LITT procedure.

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Background: Mind-body treatments can improve coping mechanisms to deal with pain, improve the quality of life of patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), and reduce perceived pain in some cases. However, responses to these treatments are highly variable, the mechanisms underpinning them remain unclear, and reliable predictors of treatment response are lacking. We employed resting-state blood oxygen level-dependent (rsBOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in brain functional connectivity (FC) following mind-body treatment that may relate to and predict pain relief.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The study aimed to identify consistent DNA methylation (DNAm) markers associated with delirium by analyzing blood samples from four different patient cohorts.
  • * Results showed that 11 out of 13 previously identified top CpG sites had significant DNAm differences between delirious and non-delirious patients, suggesting that epigenetic biomarkers could be useful for diagnosis and understanding delirium's underlying biology.
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Low-intensity Transcranial Ultrasound Stimulation is a promising non-invasive technique for brain stimulation and focal neuromodulation. Research with humans and animal models has raised the possibility that TUS can be biased towards enhancing or suppressing neural function. Here, we first collate a set of hypotheses on the directionality of TUS effects and conduct an initial meta-analysis on the available TUS studies reporting stimulation parameters and outcomes ( = 47 studies, 52 experiments).

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Background: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is believed to alter ongoing neural activity and cause circuit-level changes in brain function. While the electrophysiological effects of TMS have been extensively studied with scalp electroencephalography (EEG), this approach generally evaluates low-frequency neural activity at the cortical surface. However, TMS can be safely used in patients with intracranial electrodes (iEEG), allowing for direct assessment of deeper and more localized oscillatory responses across the frequency spectrum.

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Telomeres are important to chromosomal stability, and changes in their length correlate with disease, potentially relevant to brain disorders. Assessing telomere length in human brain is invasive, but whether peripheral tissue telomere length correlates with that in brain is not known. Saliva, buccal, blood, and brain samples were collected at time points before, during, and after subjects undergoing neurosurgery ( = 35) for intractable epilepsy.

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Auditory semantic novelty - a new meaningful sound in the context of a predictable acoustical environment - can probe neural circuits involved in language processing. Aberrant novelty detection is a feature of many neuropsychiatric disorders. This large-scale human intracranial electrophysiology study examined the spatial distribution of gamma and alpha power and auditory evoked potentials (AEP) associated with responses to unexpected words during performance of semantic categorization tasks.

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