brainlife.io: a decentralized and open-source cloud platform to support neuroscience research.

Neuroscience is advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, data pipeline complexity has increased, hindering FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) access. brainlife.io was developed to democratize neuroimaging research. The platform provides data standardization, management, visualization and processing and automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects. Here, brainlife.io is described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability and scientific utility using four data modalities and 3,200 participants.

brainlife.io: A decentralized and open source cloud platform to support neuroscience research.

Neuroscience research has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years by advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, the complexity of the data pipeline has also increased, hindering access to FAIR data analysis to portions of the worldwide research community. brainlife.io was developed to reduce these burdens and democratize modern neuroscience research across institutions and career levels. Using community software and hardware infrastructure, the platform provides open-source data standardization, management, visualization, and processing and simplifies the data pipeline. brainlife.io automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects, supporting simplicity, efficiency, and transparency in neuroscience research. Here brainlife.io's technology and data services are described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability, and scientific utility. Using data from 4 modalities and 3,200 participants, we demonstrate that brainlife.io's services produce outputs that adhere to best practices in modern neuroscience research.

White matter alterations in glaucoma and monocular blindness differ outside the visual system.

The degree to which glaucoma has effects in the brain beyond the eye and the visual pathways is unclear. To clarify this, we investigated white matter microstructure (WMM) in 37 tracts of patients with glaucoma, monocular blindness, and controls. We used brainlife.io for reproducibility. White matter tracts were subdivided into seven categories ranging from those primarily involved in vision (the visual white matter) to those primarily involved in cognition and motor control. In the vision tracts, WMM was decreased as measured by fractional anisotropy in both glaucoma and monocular blind subjects compared to controls, suggesting neurodegeneration due to reduced sensory inputs. A test-retest approach was used to validate these results. The pattern of results was different in monocular blind subjects, where WMM properties increased outside the visual white matter as compared to controls. This pattern of results suggests that whereas in the monocular blind loss of visual input might promote white matter reorganization outside of the early visual system, such reorganization might be reduced or absent in glaucoma. The results provide indirect evidence that in glaucoma unknown factors might limit the reorganization as seen in other patient groups following visual loss.

The large-scale structural connectome of task-specific focal dystonia.

The emerging view of dystonia is that of a large-scale functional network disorder, in which the communication is disrupted between sensorimotor cortical areas, basal ganglia, thalamus, and cerebellum. The structural underpinnings of functional alterations in dystonia are, however, poorly understood. Notably, it is unclear whether structural changes form a larger-scale dystonic network or rather remain focal to isolated brain regions, merely underlying their functional abnormalities. Using diffusion-weighted imaging and graph theoretical analysis, we examined inter-regional white matter connectivity of the whole-brain structural network in two different forms of task-specific focal dystonia, writer's cramp and laryngeal dystonia, compared to healthy individuals. We show that, in addition to profoundly altered functional network in focal dystonia, its structural connectome is characterized by large-scale aberrations due to abnormal transfer of prefrontal and parietal nodes between neural communities and the reorganization of normal hub architecture, commonly involving the insula and superior frontal gyrus in patients compared to controls. Other prominent common changes involved the basal ganglia, parietal and cingulate cortical regions, whereas premotor and occipital abnormalities distinctly characterized the two forms of dystonia. We propose a revised pathophysiological model of focal dystonia as a disorder of both functional and structural connectomes, where dystonia form-specific abnormalities underlie the divergent mechanisms in the development of distinct clinical symptomatology. These findings may guide the development of novel therapeutic strategies directed at targeted neuromodulation of pathophysiological brain regions for the restoration of their structural and functional connectivity.

Sexual Dimorphism Within Brain Regions Controlling Speech Production.

Neural processing of speech production has been traditionally attributed to the left hemisphere. However, it remains unclear if there are structural bases for speech functional lateralization and if these may be partially explained by sexual dimorphism of cortical morphology. We used a combination of high-resolution MRI and speech-production functional MRI to examine cortical thickness of brain regions involved in speech control in healthy males and females. We identified greater cortical thickness of the left Heschl's gyrus in females compared to males. Additionally, rightward asymmetry of the supramarginal gyrus and leftward asymmetry of the precentral gyrus were found within both male and female groups. Sexual dimorphism of the Heschl's gyrus may underlie known differences in auditory processing for speech production between males and females, whereas findings of asymmetries within cortical areas involved in speech motor execution and planning may contribute to the hemispheric localization of functional activity and connectivity of these regions within the speech production network. Our findings highlight the importance of consideration of sex as a biological variable in studies on neural correlates of speech control.

Same or Different: The Overlap Between Children With Auditory Processing Disorders and Children With Other Developmental Disorders: A Systematic Review.

OBJECTIVES: Children diagnosed with auditory processing disorders (APD) experience difficulties in auditory functioning and with memory, attention, language, and reading tasks. However, it is not clear whether the behavioral characteristics of these children are distinctive from the behavioral characteristics of children diagnosed with a different developmental disorder, such as specific language impairment (SLI), dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning disorder (LD), or autism spectrum disorder. This study describes the performance of children diagnosed with APD, SLI, dyslexia, ADHD, and LD to different outcome measurements. The aim of this study was to determine (1) which characteristics of APD overlap with the characteristics of children with SLI, dyslexia, ADHD, LD, or autism spectrum disorder; and (2) if there are characteristics that distinguish children diagnosed with APD from children diagnosed with other developmental disorders. DESIGN: A systematic review. Six electronic databases (Pubmed, CINAHL, Eric, PsychINFO, Communication & Mass Media Complete, and EMBASE) were searched to find peer-reviewed studies from 1954 to May 2015. The authors included studies reporting behaviors and performance of children with (suspected) APD and children diagnosed with a different developmental disorder (SLI, Dyslexia, ADHD, and LD). Two researchers identified and screened the studies independently. Methodological quality of the included studies was assessed with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's levels-of-evidence scheme. RESULTS: In total, 13 studies of which the methodological quality was moderate were included in this systematic review. In five studies, the performance of children diagnosed with APD was compared with the performance of children diagnosed with SLI: in two with children diagnosed with dyslexia, one with children diagnosed with ADHD, and in another one with children diagnosed with LD. Ten of the studies included children who met the criteria for more than one diagnosis. In four studies, there was a comparison made between the performances of children with comorbid disorders. There were no studies found in which the performance of children diagnosed with APD was compared with the performance of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Children diagnosed with APD broadly share the same characteristics as children diagnosed with other developmental disorders, with only minor differences between them. Differences were determined with the auditory and visual Duration Pattern Test, the Children's Auditory Processing Performance Scale questionnaire, and the subtests of the Listening in Spatialized Noise-Sentences test, in which noise is spatially separated from target sentences. However, these differences are not consistent between studies and are not found in comparison to all groups of children with other developmental disorders. CONCLUSIONS: Children diagnosed with APD perform equally to children diagnosed with SLI, dyslexia, ADHD, and LD on tests of intelligence, memory or attention, and language tests. Only small differences between groups were found for sensory and perceptual functioning tasks (auditory and visual). In addition, children diagnosed with dyslexia performed poorer in reading tasks compared with children diagnosed with APD. The result is possibly confounded by poor quality of the research studies and the low quality of the used outcome measures. More research with higher scientific rigor is required to better understand the differences and similarities in children with various neurodevelopmental disorders.

Neurodegeneration beyond the primary visual pathways in a population with a high incidence of normal-pressure glaucoma.

PURPOSE: Glaucoma is the most common age-related neurodegenerative eye disease in western society. It is an insidious disease that, when untreated or detected too late, leads inevitably to blindness. An outstanding issue is whether glaucoma should be considered exclusively an eye disease or also a brain disease. To further examine it, we used Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) to study white matter integrity in a Japanese glaucoma population. This population has a very high incidence of normal-pressure glaucoma, in which optic nerve damage occurs in the absence of the elevated eye pressure that characterises the more common form of glaucoma. METHODS: We performed DTI in 30 participants with normal-pressure glaucoma and 21 age-matched healthy controls. We used voxel-wise tract-based spatial statistics to compare fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity of the white matter of the brain between patients and control group. Whole-brain and region of interest-based analyses served to find associations between diffusion indices and clinical measures of glaucomatous damage. RESULTS: Fractional Anisotropy was significantly lower in glaucoma patients in a cluster in the right occipital lobe (p < 0.05; family-wise error-corrected) comprising fibres of both the optic radiation and the forceps major. Additional analysis confirmed bilateral involvement of the optic radiations and forceps major and additionally revealed damage to the corpus callosum and parietal lobe (p < 0.09; family-wise error-corrected). The region of interest-based analysis revealed a positive association between Fractional Anisotropy of the optic radiation and optic nerve damage. CONCLUSIONS: In this specific population, glaucoma is associated with lower Fractional Anisotropy in the optic radiations, forceps major and corpus callosum. We interpret these reductions as evidence for white matter degeneration in these loci. In particular, the degeneration of the corpus callosum suggests the presence of neurodegeneration of the brain beyond what can be explained on the basis of propagated retinal and pre-geniculate damage. We discuss how this finding links to the emerging view that a brain component that is independent from the eye damage plays a role in the aetiology of glaucoma.

Structural brain MRI studies in eye diseases: are they clinically relevant? A review of current findings.

Many eye diseases reduce visual acuity or are associated with visual field defects. Because of the well-defined retinotopic organization of the connections of the visual pathways, this may affect specific parts of the visual pathways and cortex, as a result of either deprivation or transsynaptic degeneration. For this reason, over the past several years, numerous structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have examined the association of eye diseases with pathway and brain changes. Here, we review structural MRI studies performed in human patients with the eye diseases albinism, amblyopia, hereditary retinal dystrophies, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and glaucoma. We focus on two main questions. First, what have these studies revealed? Second, what is the potential clinical relevance of their findings? We find that all the aforementioned eye diseases are indeed associated with structural changes in the visual pathways and brain. As such changes have been described in very different eye diseases, in our view the most parsimonious explanation is that these are caused by the loss of visual input and the subsequent deprivation of the visual pathways and brain regions, rather than by transsynaptic degeneration. Moreover, and of clinical relevance, for some of the diseases - in particular glaucoma and AMD - present results are compatible with the view that the eye disease is part of a more general neurological or neurodegenerative disorder that also affects the brain. Finally, establishing structural changes of the visual pathways has been relevant in the context of new therapeutic strategies to restore retinal function: it implies that restoring retinal function may not suffice to also effectively restore vision. Future structural MRI studies can contribute to (i) further establish relationships between ocular and neurological neurodegenerative disorders, (ii) investigate whether brain degeneration in eye diseases is reversible, (iii) evaluate the use of neuroprotective medication in ocular disease, (iv) determine optimal timing for retinal implant insertion and (v) establish structural MRI examination as a diagnostic tool in ophthalmology.