To date, there is no consensus on how to semi-quantitatively assess brain amyloid PET.

Researchers used data from 85 patients who underwent dual time-point PET/MRI acquisitions. The correlations with a gold standard (SI) were computed and the methods compared with the visual assessment.

Each quantifier exhibited excellent agreement with visual assessment and strong correlation with SI (average AUC = 0.99, ρ = 0.91). Among the other methods, TDr came closest to the reference with less implementation complexity.

The ability of techniques integrating blood perfusion to depict age-related variations in amyloid load in amyloid-negative subjects demonstrates the goodness of the estimate.

What are the cognitive abilities of a newly hatched zebrafish? A research from the University of Padova found that hatchings are able to associate a visual stimulus with presence of food. Learning occurs much faster in larvae than in adult zebrafish, requiring less than 48h to establish an association.

This feature was exploited to assess the capacity of larval zebrafish to recognize objects. Larvae can easily discriminate two objects by their color or shape. They can also perceive more complex visual properties, being able to discriminate two identical objects with a different spatial orientation or an object from its mirror image.

Carola Dell’Acqua and Elisa Dal Bò, both Doctoral students at PNC working with the psychophysiology lab of the Department of General Psychology, have recently published a longitudinal study aimed at examining whether the predictive role of anxiety on the development of pandemic-related post-traumatic stress symptoms was modulated by individual differences in neural activity during the processing of emotional stimuli.

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