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Tau imaging levels correlate with worse memory in living AD patients
Gabrielle Strobel at the inimitable AlzForum has a nice article about how tau imaging levels correlate more strongly with memory deficits than amyloid imaging levels in patients with AD, based on...
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Four thoughts on how amyloid beta mediates cognitive decline
A new paper addresses the question “how does the presence of amyloid beta (Ab) on neuroimaging correlate with memory deficits?” in a variety of interesting ways. Here are some assorted thoughts: 1)...
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Tau affects cortex, while amyloid affects the hippocampus?
That’s what this article by Wang et al suggests. Quantitatively, they found that: In CSF tau-positive individuals (i.e. those with >= 500 pg/mL; ~ 1/4 of the total cohort), CSF tau correlates...
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Age-related changes in white matter are likely not due to demyelination?
That’s the conclusion of an important new paper from Billiet et al that integrated a bunch of different imaging modalities. First, they used DTI to measure fractional anisotropy, which is a...
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Parkinson’s GWAS improves when subclassifying patients by pathology, instead...
Simón-Sánchez and Gasser discuss this in a stimulating article in the most recent issue of Neurology: Beecham et al [2015] argue that one of the reasons for this “missing heritability” may be the...
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How to run kallisto on NCBI SRA RNA-Seq data for differential expression...
Attention Conservation Notice: This post explains how to run the exceptionally fast RNA-seq k-mer aligner kallisto from the Pachter lab on data you download from NCBI’s Short Read Archive, and then...
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Telomeres: something to fear, or merely a seer?
Attention Conservation Notice: 1200+ words, with an estimated read time of seven minutes, of exuberant extrapolation from a new study which I was not associated with in any way. I am not an expert in...
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Generating new protein sequences with a character-level recurrent neural network
This past weekend, using Andrej Karpathy’s outrageously simple and helpful github repository [1], I trained a recurrent neural network on my laptop [2]. If you are reading this post in part because you...
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Notes on segmenting oligodendrocytes in electron microscopy images using...
Attention Conservation Notice: Not much new here; mostly just notes to myself for future reference. Reading this is unlikely to be a good use of your time, unless you are trying to install OpenCV 3.0...
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Children with genetic risk of autosomal AD have higher plasma abeta levels
Cross-sectional measures of structural and functional MRI and plasma Aβ assays were assessed in 18 PSEN1 E280A carriers and 19 noncarriers aged 9 to 17 years from a Colombian kindred with ADAD…...
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How to version control Microsoft Word documents among collaborators
Abstract: Just a quick little tool I use to version control my drafts; highly, highly unlikely to be of use unless you a) use git and want to regularly back up the text of your Word document and b) are...
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Twelve Interesting Recent Papers
1) Wootla et al. discussing naturally occurring antibodies for treatment of CNS disorders. Naturally occurring antibodies are mainly IgM and bind to many different types of antigens with low affinity...
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Why Clinical Biomarkers for AD Matter
Frisoni et al. make this interesting point: In HIV and cancer, success in fighting the disease was heralded by biomarkers — CD4 counts and viral load for HIV, and a wide variety of tumor markers in...
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Genetic Associations with Neuroimaging Anatomic Variability
Gutman et al. recently published an interesting paper about the role of genetics in explaining surface variability in neuroimaging-defined structures. It’s common to consider the role of heritability...
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Clinical trial evidence related to calling Alzheimer’s “Type 3 Diabetes”
Attention conservation notice: These are just a few impressions from only 2-3 years of following the AD field — I’m certainly not an expert in any of this. Also, I am not a doctor. The evidence behind...
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Single formaldehyde-fixed cells retain strong epigenomic signals
Attention conservation notice: Basically only interesting if you care about the preservation quality of cells and tissues following formaldehyde treatment. This past week Jin et al published good...
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Technical debt: probably the main roadblack in applying machine learning to...
Attention conservation notice: These are just loose thoughts on a topic that I’ve been thinking about for a few years. It’s important to point out that I’m far from an expert in either machine learning...
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Six weeks of exercise leads to increases in myelination
An interesting article by Thomas et al. recently measured the effect of six weeks of exercise on neuroimaging measures. Contra to expectations, they found that cerebral blood volume did not...
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Five take aways on a history of automated ECG interpretation
Follow-up to: Technical debt: probably the main roadblack in applying machine learning to medicine As a friend points out, the question “can a computer even accurately diagnose an ECG reading?” is one...
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Nine paradoxes with a statistical theme
Questions A drill sergeant always yells at one of his trainees when she messes up. The drill sergeant notices that after he yells at her, her performance improves. Later it turns out that the trainee...
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