Publications by authors named "William T Clarke"

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is an increasingly adopted standard for organizing scientific data and metadata. It facilitates easier and more straightforward data sharing and reuse. BIDS currently encompasses several biomedical imaging and non-imaging techniques, and as more research groups begin to use it, additional experimental techniques are being incorporated into the standard, allowing diverse experimental methods to be stored within the same cohesive structure.

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Myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a common debilitating medical condition, whose main symptoms - fatigue, post-exertional malaise and cognitive dysfunction - are also present in many cases of long COVID. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) allows the insight into their pathophysiology through exploration of a range of biochemicals putatively relevant to aetiological processes, in particular mitochondrial dysfunction and energy metabolism. 24 patients with ME/CFS, 25 patients with long COVID and 24 healthy controls (HC) underwent brain (pregenual and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, respectively, pgACC and dACC) and calf muscle MRS scanning at 7 Tesla, followed by a computerised cognitive assessment.

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GABAergic neurotransmission within the cortex plays a key role in learning and is altered in several brain diseases. Quantification of bulk GABA in the human brain is typically obtained by magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS). However, the interpretation of MRS-GABA is still debated.

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Early childhood experience alters visual development, a process exemplified by amblyopia, a common neurodevelopmental condition resulting in cortically reduced vision in one eye. Visual deficits in amblyopia may be a consequence of abnormal suppressive interactions in the primary visual cortex by inhibitory neurotransmitter γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA). We examined the relationship between visual acuity loss and GABA+ in adult human participants with amblyopia.

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Binocular disparity is used for perception and action in three dimensions. Neurons in the primary visual cortex respond to binocular disparity in random dot patterns, even when the contrast is inverted between eyes (false depth cue). In contrast, neurons in the ventral stream largely cease to respond to false depth cues.

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Phosphorus-31 magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (P-MRSI) provides valuable non-invasivein vivoinformation on tissue metabolism but is burdened by poor sensitivity and prolonged scan duration. Ultra-short echo time (UTE) acquisitions minimize signal loss when probing signals with relatively short spin-spin relaxation time (T), while also preventing first-order dephasing. Here, a three-dimensional (3D) UTE sequence with a rosette k-space trajectory (PETALUTE) is applied to P-MRSI at 3T.

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Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) is an emerging Magnetic Resonance technique providing valuable insight into the dynamics of cellular glucose (Glc) metabolism of the human brain in vivo using deuterium-labeled (H) glucose as non-invasive tracer. Reliable concentration estimation of H-Glc and downstream synthesized neurotransmitters glutamate + glutamine (Glx) requires accurate knowledge of relaxation times, but so far tissue-specific T and T relaxation times (e.g.

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Background: Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) is a condition in which people with vision loss experience complex visual hallucinations. These complex visual hallucinations may be caused by increased excitability in the visual cortex that are present in some people with vision loss but not others.

Objectives: We aimed to evaluate the association between γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in the visual cortex and CBS.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) lacks specific treatments, but creatine, which supports cellular energy, was tested as a potential intervention.
  • - In a study with 14 ME/CFS participants, those who took creatine for 6 weeks showed increased brain creatine levels, reduced fatigue, improved reaction times on cognitive tests, and enhanced hand-grip strength.
  • - The findings suggest that creatine supplementation can benefit ME/CFS patients, prompting the need for further research with placebo controls for solid conclusions.
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Article Synopsis
  • Post-mortem studies reveal that patients who died from COVID-19 often show brainstem damage, which may result from immune responses during and after the infection.
  • Symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness, and chest pain in post-hospitalization COVID-19 patients may be linked to these brainstem abnormalities.
  • Using advanced MRI techniques, a study found increased susceptibility in key brainstem regions of COVID-19 survivors, indicating a correlation between these changes and the severity of their illness and recovery outcomes.
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The HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, a multi-site prospective longitudinal cohort study, will examine human brain, cognitive, behavioral, social, and emotional development beginning prenatally and planned through early childhood. The acquisition of multimodal magnetic resonance-based brain development data is central to the study's core protocol. However, application of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methods in this population is complicated by technical challenges and difficulties of imaging in early life.

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Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is linked with dysfunction in frontal-striatal, fronto-limbic, and visual brain regions. Research using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (H-MRS) suggests that altered neurometabolite levels, like glutamate, may contribute to this dysfunction. However, static neurometabolite levels in OCD patients have shown inconsistent results, likely due to previous studies' limited focus on neurometabolite dynamics.

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Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) is an emerging magnetic resonance technique, for non-invasive mapping of human brain glucose metabolism following oral or intravenous administration of deuterium-labeled glucose. Regional differences in glucose metabolism can be observed in various brain pathologies, such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, epilepsy or schizophrenia, but the achievable spatial resolution of conventional phase-encoded DMI methods is limited due to prolonged acquisition times rendering submilliliter isotropic spatial resolution for dynamic whole brain DMI not feasible. The purpose of this study was to implement non-Cartesian spatial-spectral sampling schemes for whole-brain H FID-MR Spectroscopic Imaging to assess time-resolved metabolic maps with sufficient spatial resolution to reliably detect metabolic differences between healthy gray and white matter regions.

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Purpose: Dynamic (2D) MRS is a collection of techniques where acquisitions of spectra are repeated under varying experimental or physiological conditions. Dynamic MRS comprises a rich set of contrasts, including diffusion-weighted, relaxation-weighted, functional, edited, or hyperpolarized spectroscopy, leading to quantitative insights into multiple physiological or microstructural processes. Conventional approaches to dynamic MRS analysis ignore the shared information between spectra, and instead proceed by independently fitting noisy individual spectra before modeling temporal changes in the parameters.

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Functional magnetic resonance spectroscopy (fMRS) is a non-invasive technique for measuring dynamic changes in neurometabolites. While previous studies have observed concentration changes in metabolites during neural activation, the relationship between neurometabolite response and stimulus intensity and timing requires further investigation. To address this, we conducted an interleaved fMRS and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment using a visual stimulus with varying contrast levels.

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Brain cell structure and function reflect neurodevelopment, plasticity, and aging; and changes can help flag pathological processes such as neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation. Accurate and quantitative methods to noninvasively disentangle cellular structural features are needed and are a substantial focus of brain research. Diffusion-weighted MRS (dMRS) gives access to diffusion properties of endogenous intracellular brain metabolites that are preferentially located inside specific brain cell populations.

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Background: Damage to the primary visual cortex following an occipital stroke causes loss of conscious vision in the contralateral hemifield. Yet, some patients retain the ability to detect moving visual stimuli within their blind field. The present study asked whether such individual differences in blind field perception following loss of primary visual cortex could be explained by the concentration of neurotransmitters γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate or activity of the visual motion processing, human middle temporal complex (hMT+).

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Magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) can non-invasively measure levels of endogenous metabolites in living tissue and is of great interest to neuroscience and clinical research. To this day, MRS data analysis workflows differ substantially between groups, frequently requiring many manual steps to be performed on individual datasets, e.g.

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Proton-Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) is a non-invasive brain imaging technique used to measure the concentration of different neurochemicals. "Single-voxel" MRS data is typically acquired across several minutes, before individual transients are averaged through time to give a measurement of neurochemical concentrations. However, this approach is not sensitive to more rapid temporal dynamics of neurochemicals, including those that reflect functional changes in neural computation relevant to perception, cognition, motor control and ultimately behaviour.

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Background: The failing heart is traditionally described as metabolically inflexible and oxygen starved, causing energetic deficit and contractile dysfunction. Current metabolic modulator therapies aim to increase glucose oxidation to increase oxygen efficiency of adenosine triphosphate production, with mixed results.

Methods: To investigate metabolic flexibility and oxygen delivery in the failing heart, 20 patients with nonischemic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (left ventricular ejection fraction 34.

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In humans, motor learning is underpinned by changes in sensorimotor network functional connectivity (FC). Unilateral contractions increase FC in the ipsilateral primary motor cortex (M1) and supplementary motor area (SMA); areas involved in motor planning and execution of the contralateral hand. Therefore, unilateral contractions are a promising approach to augment motor performance in the contralateral hand.

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Motor adaptation is crucial for performing accurate movements in a changing environment and relies on the cerebellum. Although cerebellar involvement has been well characterized, the neurochemical changes in the cerebellum underpinning human motor adaptation remain unknown. We used a novel magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) technique to measure changes in the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in the human cerebellum during visuomotor adaptation.

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Purpose: Multiple data formats in the MRS community currently hinder data sharing and integration. NIfTI-MRS is proposed as a standard spectroscopy data format, implemented as an extension to the Neuroimaging informatics technology initiative (NIfTI) format. This standardized format can facilitate data sharing and algorithm development as well as ease integration of MRS analysis alongside other imaging modalities.

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A three-dimensional (3D), density-weighted, concentric rings trajectory (CRT) magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) sequence is implemented for cardiac phosphorus ( P)-MRS at 7 T. The point-by-point k-space sampling of traditional phase-encoded chemical shift imaging (CSI) sequences severely restricts the minimum scan time at higher spatial resolutions. Our proposed CRT sequence implements a stack of concentric rings, with a variable number of rings and planes spaced to optimise the density of k-space weighting.

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Background And Objective: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has wide ranging applications in neuro-behavioural and physiological research, and in neurological rehabilitation. However, it is currently limited by substantial inter-subject variability in responses, which may be explained, at least in part, by anatomical differences that lead to variability in the electric field (E-field) induced in the cortex. Here, we tested whether the variability in the E-field in the stimulated cortex during anodal tDCS, estimated using computational simulations, explains the variability in tDCS induced changes in GABA, a neurophysiological marker of stimulation effect.

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