Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which shows high risk for conversion to Alzheimer's disease (AD), is accompanied by progressive visual deteriorations that so far are poorly understood. Here, we compared dorsal and ventral visual stream functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity among amnestic MCI, healthy elderly, and young participants during structure-from-motion (SFM) face categorization performance. Task performance varied with stimulus depth and duration levels and differences among groups were highly correlated with face-related fMRI activation patterns. Young participants showed larger activation to faces than scrambled faces (face sensitivity) in the right fusiform face area (FFA) and right occipital face area (OFA) whereas in elderly, this difference was reduced. Surprisingly, in MCI, scrambled faces elicited larger activation in right FFA/OFA than faces. The latter observation may be related to the additional finding of elevated depth sensitivity in left FFA/OFA of MCI, suggesting that an increased representation of low-level stimulus aspects may impair face perception in MCI. Discriminant function analysis using face and depth sensitivity indices in FFA/OFA classified MCI and healthy elderly with 88.2% accuracy, marking a fundamental distinction between groups. Potentially related findings include altered activation patterns in dorsal–ventral stream integration regions and attention-related networks of MCI patients. Our results highlight aberrant visual and additional potentially compensatory processes that identify dispositions of (preclinical) AD.

The tribal character of the affective link between football fans and their teams is a well-recognized phenomenon. Other forms of love such as romantic or maternal attachment have previously been studied from a neuroimaging point of view. Here we aimed to investigate the neural basis of this tribal form of love, which implies both the feeling of belongingness and rivalry against opposing teams. A pool of 56 participants was submitted to an fMRI experimental design involving the presentation of winning and losing football moments of their loved, rival or neutral teams. We found recruitment of amygdala and reward regions, including the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and substantia nigra (SN), as well as other limbic regions involved in emotional cognition, for ‘positive vs neutral’ and ‘positive vs negative’ conditions. The latter contrast was correlated with neuropsychological scores of fanaticism in the amygdala and regions within the reward system, as the VTA and SN. The observation of increased response patterns in critical components of the reward system, in particular for positive content related to the loved team, suggests that this kind of non-romantic love reflects a specific arousal and motivational state, which is biased for emotional learning of positive outcomes.

People with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) have a variable and often progressive disease course that is associated with biliary and parenchymal changes. These changes are typically assessed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), including qualitative assessment of magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP). Our aim was to study the association of novel objective quantitative MRCP metrics with prognostic scores and patient outcomes. We performed a retrospective study including 77 individuals with large-duct PSC with baseline MRCP images, which were postprocessed to obtain quantitative measures of bile ducts using MRCP+™. The participants’ ANALI scores, liver stiffness by vibration-controlled transient elastography, and biochemical indices were collected at baseline. Adverse outcome-free survival was measured as the absence of decompensated cirrhosis, liver transplantation (LT), or liver-related death over a 12-year period. The prognostic value of MRCP+-derived metrics was assessed by Cox regression modelling. During a total of 386 patients-years, 16 cases of decompensation, 2 LTs, and 5 liver-related deaths were recorded. At baseline, around 50% of the patients were classified as being at risk of developing disease complications. MRCP+ metrics, particularly those describing the severity of bile duct dilatations, were correlated with all prognostic factors. Univariate analysis showed that MRCP+ metrics representing duct diameter, dilatations, and the percentage of ducts with strictures and/or dilatations were associated with survival. In a multivariable-adjusted analysis, the median duct diameter was significantly associated with survival (hazard ratio 10.9, 95% CI 1.3–90.3). MRCP+ metrics in people with PSC correlate with biochemical, elastographic, and radiological prognostic scores and are predictive of adverse outcome-free survival. In this study, we assessed in people with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) the association of novel objective quantitative MRCP metrics automatically provided by a software tool (MRCP+) with prognostic scores and patient outcomes. We observed that MRCP+ metrics in people with PSC correlate with biochemical, elastographic, and radiological prognostic scores and are predictive of adverse outcome-free survival.

Magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP) for evaluation of biliary disease currently relies on subjective assessment with limited prognostic value because of the lack of quantitative metrics. Artificial intelligence-enabled quantitative MRCP (MRCP+) is a novel technique that segments biliary anatomy and provides quantitative biliary tree metrics. This study investigated the utility of MRCP+ as a prognostic tool for the prediction of clinical outcomes in primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). MRCP images of patients with PSC were post-processed using MRCP+ software. The duration between the MRCP and clinical event (liver transplantation or death) was calculated. Survival analysis and stepwise Cox regression were performed to investigate the optimal combination of MRCP+ metrics for the prediction of clinical outcomes. The resulting risk score was validated in a separate validation cohort and compared with an existing prognostic score (Mayo risk score). In this retrospective study, 102 patients were included in a training cohort and a separate 50 patients formed a validation cohort. Between the two cohorts, 34 patients developed clinical outcomes over a median duration of 3 years (23 liver transplantations and 11 deaths). The proportion of bile ducts with diameter 3–5 mm, total bilirubin, and aspartate aminotransferase were independently associated with transplant-free survival. Combined as a risk score, the overall discriminative performance of the MRCP+ risk score (M+BA) was excellent; area under the receiver operator curve 0.86 (95% CI: 0.77, 0.95) at predicting clinical outcomes in the validation cohort with a hazard ratio 5.8 (95% CI: 1.5, 22.1). This was superior to the Mayo risk score. A composite score combining MRCP+ with total bilirubin and aspartate aminotransferase (M+BA) identified PSC patients at high risk of liver transplantation or death. Prospective studies are warranted to evaluate the clinical utility of this novel prognostic tool. Primary sclerosis cholangitis (PSC) is a disease of the biliary tree where inflammation and fibrosis cause areas of narrowing (strictures) and expansion (dilatations) within the biliary ducts leading to liver failure and/or cancer (cholangiocarcinoma). In this study, we demonstrate that quantitative assessment of the biliary tree can better identify patients with PSC who are at high risk of either death or liver transplantation than a current blood-based risk score (Mayo risk score).

Anterior/posterior long axis specialization is thought to underlie the organization of the hippocampus. However it remains unclear whether antagonistic mechanisms differentially modulate processing of spatial information within the hippocampus. We used fMRI and a virtual reality 3D paradigm to study encoding and retrieval of spatial memory during active visuospatial navigation, requiring positional encoding and retrieval of object landmarks during the path. Both encoding and retrieval elicited BOLD activation of the posterior most portion of hippocampus, while concurrent deactivations (recently shown to reflect decreases in neural responses) were found in the most anterior regions. Encoding elicited stronger activity in the posterior right than the left hippocampus. The former structure also showed significantly stronger activity for allocentric vs. egocentric processing during retrieval. The anterior vs. posterior pattern mimics, from a functional point, although at much distinct temporal scales, the previous anatomical findings in London taxi drivers, whereby posterior enlargement was found at the cost of an anterior decrease, and the mirror symmetric findings observed in blind people, in whom the right anterior hippocampus was found to be larger, at the cost of a smaller posterior hippocampus, as compared with sighted people. In sum, we found a functional dichotomy whereby the anterior/posterior hippocampus shows antagonistic processing patterns for spatial encoding and retrieval of 3D spatial information. To our knowledge, this is the first study reporting such a dynamical pattern in a functional study, which suggests that differential modulation of neural responses within the human hippocampus reflects distinct roles in spatial memory processing.