The musculus pterygoïdeus proprius: an in-vivo approach with magnetic resonance imaging.

There is a limited understanding of the normal function of the pterygoïdeus proprius muscle and the role that this muscle may have in temporomandibular disorders. Despite a well-described anatomical in-vitro approach to this muscle, there are still difficulties in investigating the fossa pterygopalatina. This study reveals an alternative in-vivo approach by magnetic resonance imaging to visualise the muscle in the fossa pterygopalatina on 78 head halves, describe the connections with the musculus temporalis and pterygoïdeus lateralis as well as report the incidence without dealing with the known inconveniences of the dissection approach. The results show an incidence of 12.82% for the musculus pterygoïdeus proprius equally divided between both genders. Two different types of bridging between the musculus temporalis and musculus pterygoïdeus lateralis were also found: (i) 'O' shape (6.41%) and (ii) 'Y' shape (6.41%). This study suggests the use of magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the different connections between vascular and muscular structures in the fossa pterygopalatina. Further research with this approach to link the appearance of the muscle with neurovascular entrapment syndromes is warranted.

Neuroimaging of event related brain potentials (ERP) using fMRI and dipole source reconstruction.

Neuroimaging is an essential tool for the diagnosis of cognitive brain disorders along with the EEG measurements. EEG and fMRI are the two crucial modalities which reflect the functional activity inside the brain. EEG is easy to apply and provides high temporal resolution but has poor spatial resolution. Contrarily, fMRI has a higher spatial resolution while having a poor temporal resolution. In this study, multi modal data sets obtained from Event Related fMRI and EEG measurements are analyzed using SPM and LORETA based dipole source reconstruction techniques, respectively. It has been demonstrated that the generator of N170 component of ERP which is located at superior temporal region is in agreement with the SPM results of fMRI. The results imply that the joint use of fMRI and ERP data helps identifying the physiological and hemodynamic correlates of face recognition by estimating the underlying functional activity in a fine temporal and spatial resolution.