Neuroimaging in the First 6 Weeks of the COVID-19 Pandemic in an 8-Hospital Campus: Observations and Patterns in the Brain, Head and Neck, and Spine.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to aggregate neuroradiological findings in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the brain, head and neck, and spine to identify trends and unique patterns. METHODS: A retrospective review of neuroimaged COVID-19 patients during a 6-week surge in our 8-hospital campus was performed. The brain imaging with reported acute or subacute infarction, intraparenchymal hemorrhage, and all neck examinations were reinterpreted by 2 reviewers. RESULTS: Six hundred seventy-one patients met criteria and were reviewed. Acute or subacute infarction was seen in 39 (6%), intraparenchymal hemorrhage in 14 (2%), corpus callosum involvement in 7, and thalamus in 5 patients. In spine and neck studies, lung opacities and adenopathy were seen in 46 and 4 patients, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Infarction followed by intraparenchymal hemorrhage was the most common acute findings in the brain with frequent involvement of the corpus callosum and thalami. In the neck, lung abnormalities were frequently present, and adenopathy was almost always associated with a second pathology.

Unusual case of biotin-thiamine responsive encephalopathy without basal ganglia involvement.

Biotin-thiamine-responsive encephalopathy, also known as biotin-responsive basal ganglia disease, is characterized by high T2 signal in the basal ganglia (caudate and putamina), which is reported as a typical feature of the disorder. Brain magnetic resonance imaging in our patient, who presented with irritability, poor feeding and prolonged seizures, found multiple areas of restricted diffusion in the cerebral cortex and thalami leading to an initial diagnosis of a mitochondrial disorder. The basal ganglia were not affected. More characteristic chronic findings of T2 prolongation and volume loss were later seen in our patient. The child improved with biotin and thiamine supplementation, a well-known feature of the condition. It is important for the radiologist and treating team to be aware of this variant and pursue further investigations to avoid delay in care and potential fatality.

Application of Optical Topometry to Analysis of the Plant Epidermis.

The plant epidermis regulates key physiological functions contributing to photosynthetic rate, plant productivity, and ecosystem stability. Yet, quantitative characterization of this interface between a plant and its aerial environment is laborious and destructive with current techniques, making large-scale characterization of epidermal cell parameters impractical. Here, we present our exploration of optical topometry (OT) for the analysis of plant organ surfaces. OT is a mature, confocal microscopy-based implementation of surface metrology that generates nanometer-scale digital characterizations of any surface. We report epidermal analyses in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and other species as well as dried herbarium specimens and fossilized plants. We evaluate the technology's analytical potential for identifying an array of epidermal characters, including cell type distributions, variation in cell morphology and stomatal depth, differentiation of herbarium specimens, and real-time deformations in living tissue following detachment. As applied to plant material, OT is very fast and nondestructive, yielding richly mineable data sets describing living tissues and rendering a variety of their characteristics accessible for statistical, quantitative genetic, and structural analysis.