Antineoplastic busulfan encapsulated in a metal organic framework nanocarrier: first in vivo results.

Nanoparticles of a mesoporous iron(iii) trimesate MIL-100 nanocarrier encapsulating high amounts of the challenging antineoplastic busulfan were administered to rats and compared with the commercial Busilvex®. Large differences in serum concentration of both busulfan and trimesate revealed the great impact of drug encapsulation both on the drug and on nanoparticle pharmacokinetics during the first 24 h of administration.

Language dominance determined by whole brain functional MRI in patients with brain lesions.

BACKGROUND: Functional MRI (fMRI) is of potential value in determining hemisphere dominance for language in epileptic patients. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate an fMRI-based method of determining language dominance for patients with a wide range of potentially operable brain lesions in addition to epilepsy. METHODS: Initially, a within-subjects design was used with 19 healthy volunteers (11 strongly right-handed, 8 left-handed) to determine the relative lateralizing usefulness of three different language tasks in fMRI. An automated, hemispheric analysis of laterality was used to analyze whole brain fMRI data sets. To evaluate the clinical usefulness of this method, we compared fMRI-determined laterality with laterality determined by Wada testing or electrocortical stimulation mapping, or both, in 23 consecutive patients undergoing presurgical evaluation of language dominance. RESULTS: Only the verb generation task was reliably lateralizing. fMRI, using the verb generation task and an automated hemispheric analysis method, was concordant with invasive measures in 22 of 23 patients (12 Wada, 11 cortical stimulation). For the single patient who was discordant, in whom a tumor involved one-third of the left hemisphere, fMRI became concordant when the tumor and its reflection in the right hemisphere were excluded from laterality analysis. No significant negative correlation was obtained between lesion size and strength of laterality for the patients with lesions involving the dominant hemisphere. CONCLUSION: This fMRI method shows potential for evaluating language dominance in patients with a variety of brain lesions.

Functional MRI localization of language in a 9-year-old child.

BACKGROUND: Localizing critical brain functions such as language in children is difficult and generally requires invasive techniques. Recently sensory, motor and language functions in adults have been mapped to specific brain locations using functional imaging techniques. Of these techniques, functional MRI (fMRI) is the least invasive and has the highest spatial and temporal resolution. Its use in adults is well documented but application to children has not been as well described. In the present study lateralization and localization of language was evaluated with fMRI prior to epilepsy surgery in a nine-year-old male with complex partial seizures, attentional difficulty and decreased verbal proficiency. METHODS: Two language paradigms well studied in adults (read, verb generation) and two additional language paradigms (antonym generation, latter fluency) were studied using whole brain fMRI after stimulus items and timing were adjusted to achieve the desired performance level during imaging. The patient was also conditioned to the magnet environment prior to imaging. RESULTS: Word reading and letter fluency tasks produced lateralized and localized activation similar to that seen in adults. The patient had no language deficits following an anterior 2/3 dominant temporal lobe resection. CONCLUSIONS: With modifications of protocols such as those detailed in this report, this non-invasive method for localizing language function is feasible for the presurgical evaluation of children as well being applicable for a variety of developmental language issues.

The role of the corpus callosum in the representation of lateral orientation.

How do people recognize objects when they face in a novel lateral (left/right) orientation? The results of three experiments with a split-brain patient, who has a totally nonfunctional corpus callosum, demonstrate that the corpus callosum cannot play a critical role in allowing one to recognize mirror-reversed objects. First, both cerebral hemispheres could recognize mirror-reversed versions of pictures as accurately as the original renditions in an incidental memory task. Second, when asked to decide whether pictures faced the same way that they had originally, neither hemisphere performed better than chance in an incidental memory task--suggesting that the shape representations in the hemispheres do not specify lateral orientation. Third, neither hemisphere exhibited "priming" for lateral orientation, as assessed in an "object decision task", and only the left hemisphere exhibited priming for encoding the shape (independent of its lateral orientation).