Engineering strategies towards overcoming bleeding and glial scar formation around neural probes

Neural probes are sophisticated electrophysiological tools used for intra-cortical recording and stimulation. These microelectrode arrays, designed to penetrate and interface the brain from within, contribute at the forefront of basic and clinical neuroscience. However, one of the challenges and currently most significant limitations is their ‘seamless’ long-term integration into the surrounding brain tissue. Following implantation, which is typically accompanied by bleeding, the tissue responds with a scarring process, resulting in a gliotic region closest to the probe. This glial scarring is often associated with neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and a leaky blood–brain interface (BBI). The engineering progress on minimizing this reaction in the form of improved materials, microfabrication, and surgical techniques is summarized in this review. As research over the past decade has progressed towards a more detailed understanding of the nature of this biological response, it is time to pose the question: Are penetrating probes completely free from glial scarring at all possible?

Laboratoř neuropsychologie Neurologické kliniky 1. LF UK

The Laboratory of Neuropsychology (LN)—Jiří Diamant Neuropsychological Laboratory—is a generic base for research and teaching of clinical and experimental neuropsychology in close connection with clinical neuroscience research and postgraduate studies in neuroscience and medical psychology and psychopathology at the Department of Neurology. The LN provides medical services and participates in teaching and research as required by the Head of the Dept. of Neurology. The LN is a base for collaboration with external departments, especially in the areas of clinical and medical psychology, health psychology, brain imaging, neurosurgery, and psychopharmacology. The research program of the LN is mainly devoted to the neuropsychology of neurodegenerative diseases and the development of neuropsychological tools for the assessment of neuropsychiatric disorders.

Asymmetry in the Central Nervous System: A Clinical Neuroscience Perspective

Recent large-scale neuroimaging studies suggest that most parts of the human brain show structural differences between the left and the right hemisphere. Such structural hemispheric asymmetries have been reported for both cortical and subcortical structures. Interestingly, many neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders have been associated with altered functional hemispheric asymmetries. However, findings concerning the relation between structural hemispheric asymmetries and disorders have largely been inconsistent, both within specific disorders as well as between disorders. In the present review, we compare structural asymmetries from a clinical neuroscience perspective across different disorders. We focus especially on recent large-scale neuroimaging studies, to concentrate on replicable effects. With the notable exception of major depressive disorder, all reviewed disorders were associated with distinct patterns of alterations in structural hemispheric asymmetries. While autism spectrum disorder was associated with altered structural hemispheric asymmetries in a broader range of brain areas, most other disorders were linked to more specific alterations in brain areas related to cognitive functions that have been associated with the symptomology of these disorders. The implications of these findings are highlighted in the context of transdiagnostic approaches to psychopathology.

A Beautiful Friendship—and a Lesson about Friends and Colleagues: A Classic Partnership Revisited

David Warner, M.D., and Michael Todd, M.D., first met in 1985. They began working together at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa) a year later with a shared interest in both laboratory and clinical neuroscience—and in the operative care of neurosurgical patients. That collaboration has now lasted for 35 yr, resulting in more than 70 joint publications. More importantly, they have had the privilege of working together with close to 1,000 colleagues from around the world, in a dozen medical specialties. Their careers are an example of what can be accomplished by friendship, mutual commitment, persistence, and a willingness to join with others.

How Failure to Falsify contributes to the Replication Crisis in the Clinical Neurosciences

This critical review discusses evidence for the replication crisis in the clinical neuroscience literature with focus on the size of the literature and how scientific hypotheses are framed and tested. We aim to reinvigorate discussions born from philosophy of science regarding falsification (see Popper, 1959;1962) but with hope to bring pragmatic application that might give real leverage to attempts to address scientific reproducibility. The surging publication rate has not translated to unparalleled scientific progress so the current “science-by-volume” approach requires new perspective for determining scientific ground truths. We describe an example from the network neurosciences in the study of traumatic brain injury where there has been little effort to refute two prominent hypotheses leading to a literature without resolution. Based upon this example, we discuss how building strong hypotheses and then designing efforts to falsify them can bring greater precision to the clinical neurosciences. With falsification as the goal, we can harness big data and computational power to identify the fitness of each theory to advance the neurosciences.