• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.275-279
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• 2018

A brain abscess is caused by an infection in the central nervous system and leads to significant neurological sequelae. Despite advances in neurocritical care, high morbidity and mortality rates are still associated with brain abscess, especially in certain high-risk patients. Thus, a brain abscess is a medical emergency requiring prompt diagnosis and treatment with antibacterial therapy. However, the recurrence of brain abscess is rare. A 59-year-old man presented at our neurology clinic with a headache and was found to have chronic otitis media. Serial brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the patient demonstrated a brain abscess in the right frontal lobe. Following stereotactic aspiration of the brain abscess and proper antimicrobial treatment, the patient recovered completely. Five months after discharge, the patient revisited our clinic with a headache and seizure symptoms, and recurrence of the brain abscess was confirmed by brain MRI. Recurrent brain abscess has been documented in patients with predisposing conditions such as retained foreign bodies, chronic sinusitis, arteriovenous fistula, and right-to-left shunt.

• Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society
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• v.60 no.1
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• pp.118-124
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• 2017

Brain abscess commonly occurs secondary to an adjacent infection (mostly in the middle ear or paranasal sinuses) or due to hematogenous spread from a distant infection or trauma. Pulmonary arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs) are abnormal direct communications between the pulmonary artery and vein. We present two cases of brain abscess associated with asymptomatic pulmonary AVF. A 65-year-old woman was admitted with a headache and cognitive impairment that aggravated 10 days prior. An magnetic resonance (MR) imaging revealed a brain abscess with severe edema in the right frontal lobe. We performed a craniotomy and abscess removal. Bacteriological culture proved negative. Her chest computed tomography (CT) showed multiple AVFs. Therapeutic embolization of multiple pulmonary AVFs was performed and antibiotics were administered for 8 weeks. A 45-year-old woman presented with a 7-day history of progressive left hemiparesis. She had no remarkable past medical history or family history. On admission, blood examination showed a white blood cell count of 6290 cells/uL and a high sensitive C-reactive protein of 2.62 mg/L. CT and MR imaging with MR spectroscopy revealed an enhancing lesion involving the right motor and sensory cortex with marked perilesional edema that suggested a brain abscess. A chest CT revealed a pulmonary AVF in the right upper lung. The pulmonary AVF was obliterated with embolization. There needs to consider pulmonary AVF as an etiology of cerebral abscess when routine investigations fail to detect a source.

• Korean Journal of Radiology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.68-74
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• 2001

Objective: To describe the brain CT and MR imaging findings of unusual acute encephalitis involving the thalamus. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively reviewed the medical records and CT and/or MR imaging findings of six patients with acute encephalitis involving the thalamus. CT (n=6) and MR imaging (n=6) were performed during the acute and/or convalescent stage of the illness. Results: Brain CT showed brain swelling (n=2), low attenuation of both thalami (n=1) or normal findings (n=3). Initial MR imaging indicated that in all patients the thalamus was involved either bilaterally (n=5) or unilaterally (n=1). Lesions were also present in the midbrain (n=5), medial temporal lobe (n=4), pons (n=3), both hippocampi (n=3) the insular cortex (n=2), medulla (n=2), lateral temporal lobe cortex (n=1), both cingulate gyri (n=1), both basal ganglia (n=1), and the left hemispheric cortex (n=1). Conclusion: These CT or MR imaging findings of acute encephalitis of unknown etiology were similar to a combination of those of Japanese encephalitis and herpes simplex encephalitis. In order to document the specific causative agents which lead to the appearance of these imaging features, further investigation is required.

• Annals of Clinical Neurophysiology
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.31-33
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• 2005

Segmental zoster paresis (SZP) is a clinically rare complication of herpes zoster. But it has not been reported that acute cerebral motor cortical infarction coincidentally occurred in SZP. A 86-year-old woman was admitted due to pain, tingling sensation, and weakness of left arm. She had an acute onset of pain and tingling sensation in left arm at first day, shoulder weakness at second day, and multifocal vesicles at fourth day. Deep tendon reflexes of left arm were decreased than right. Electromyography showed an axonal polyneuropathy at superior trunk level of left brachial plexus. Median and ulnar sensory evoked potential tests were normal. Brain MRI showed a high signal in right primary motor cortex on diffusion weighted image. We report a case of acute cerebral motor cortical infarction coincidentally occurred in SZP.

• Investigative Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.250-253
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• 2016

Acute Japanese encephalitis (JE) is an endemic viral infectious disease in various parts of Far East and Southeast Asian countries including Korea. Bilateral thalami are the most common involving sites in JE. Other areas including the basal ganglia, substantia nigra, red nucleus, pons, cerebral cortex and cerebellum may be also involved. We report an extremely unusual brain diffusion-weighted MR imaging (DWI) findings in a 53-year-old man with serologically proven JE involving unilateral deep gray matter and temporal lobe, which shows multifocal high signal intensities in left thalamus, left substantia nigra, left caudate nucleus and left medial temporal cortex on T2-weighted image and DWI with iso-intensity on apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) map.

• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.541-550
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• 2009

This research attempted to find out any implications for strategies to design and develop the connections between the activities of the brain function and the fields of English learning (dictation, word level, speaking, word memory, listening). Thus, in developing the brain based learning model for the English education, attempts need to be made to help learners to keep the whole brain toward learning. On this point, this study indicated the significant results for the exclusive brain location and the brainwaves on the each English learning field by the quantitative EEG analysis. The results of this study presented the guidelines for the balanced development of the left brain and the right brain to train the specific site of the brain connected to the English learning fields. In addition, whole brain training model is developed by the quantitative EEG data not by the theoretical learning methods focused on the right brain training.

• Dementia and Neurocognitive Disorders
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.138-146
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• 2022

Background and Purpose: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) helps with brain development analysis and disease diagnosis. Brain volumes measured from different ages using MRI provides useful information in clinical evaluation and research. Therefore, we trained machine learning models that predict the brain age gap of healthy subjects in the East Asian population using T1 brain MRI volume images. Methods: In total, 154 T1-weighted MRIs of healthy subjects (55-83 years of age) were collected from an East Asian community. The information of age, gender, and education level was collected for each participant. The MRIs of the participants were preprocessed using FreeSurfer(https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/) to collect the brain volume data. We trained the models using different supervised machine learning regression algorithms from the scikit-learn (https://scikit-learn.org/) library. Results: The trained models comprised 19 features that had been reduced from 55 brain volume labels. The algorithm BayesianRidge (BR) achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) and r squared (R²) of 3 and 0.3 years, respectively, in predicting the age of the new subjects compared to other regression methods. The results of feature importance analysis showed that the right pallidum, white matter hypointensities on T1-MRI scans, and left hippocampus comprise some of the essential features in predicting brain age. Conclusions: The MAE and R² accuracies of the BR model predicting brain age gap in the East Asian population showed that the model could reduce the dimensionality of neuroimaging data to provide a meaningful biomarker for individual brain aging.

• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.805-813
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• 2004

Our educational system clearly places much greater value on left hemisphere learning. Students who process information in other ways are at a serious disadvantage and may not be learning efficiently. Since mind mapping emphasizing visual and spatial language, it helps students to use the whole brain and promotes more effective comprehension. The purpose of this research was to determine the effects of the instruction using mind map on the science achievement of students. A pretest-posttest control group design was employed. Subjects were 153 male and female, first grade students in a middle school. A control group of 83 was instructed with a traditional teaching method, and an experimental group of 70 was instructed by using a mind mapping strategy. Two groups were treated for 50 hours during 17 weeks. Tolerance's 'Style Of Learning And Thinking(SOLAT)' was used to assess students' lateralization preferences. A 30-item multiple choice posttest was used to assess students' achievement. To analyze the data, we used an analysis of covariance(ANCOVA) and i-tests. It was found that 21.6% of students was left brain dominant, 31.4%, right brain dominant and 47.1 % was integrated style. There was no gender difference in hemispheric dominance. Significant differences existed between the test scores when they were taught by using a mind map. Mind mapping turned out to be a valuable learning technique for the right brain students, helping them to achieve the same level of subject mastery as left brain students. There was a significant difference between males and females in relation to mind map application. Female scored significantly higher than males.

• Journal of Science Education
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• v.46 no.3
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• pp.255-265
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to analyze and compare brain activation that appears in the self-regulation process of biology major and non-major college students in life science learning. The self-regulation task implemented a life science learning situation with the concept of biological classification. The brain activation of college students was measured and analyzed by fNIRS. In the assimilation process, bilateral FP and left DLPFC show significant activation, and the two groups show a difference in the left OFC activation related to motivation and reward. In the conflict process, the left DLPFC shows significantly lower activation in common, and the two groups show a difference in activation between BA 46, which is related to recent memory, and BA 47, which is related to long-term memory. In the accommodation process, a significantly high activation was found in right DLPFC in common, and the two groups show a difference in activation between right DLPFC and right FP. These areas are in the right frontal lobe area and are related to the understanding of life science knowledge. As a result of this study, it can be seen that the brain activation patterns of biology major and non-major college students are different in the self-regulation process. In addition, we will propose additional neurological studies on self-regulation and present systems and learning strategies that can be constructed in school settings.

• Sleep Medicine and Psychophysiology
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.67-76
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• 2020

Objectives: Brain maturation involves brain lateralization and asymmetry to achieve efficient information processing and cognitive controls. This study elucidates normal brain maturation change during the gap between ages 6-9 and age 14-17 using resting EEG. Methods: An EEG dataset was acquired from open source MIPDB (Multimodal Resource for Studying Information Processing in the Developing Brain). Ages 6-9 (n = 24) and ages 14-17 (n = 26) were selected for analysis, and subjects with psychiatric illness or EEG with severe noise were excluded. Finally, ages 6-9 (n = 14) and ages 14-17 (n = 11) were subjected to EEG analysis using EEGlab. A 120-sec length of resting EEG when eyes were closed was secured for analysis. Brain topography was compartmentalized into nine regions, best fitted with brain anatomical structure. Results: Absolute power of the delta band and theta band in ages 6-9 was greater than that of ages 14-17 in the whole brain, and, also is relative power of delta band in frontal compartment, which is same line with previous studies. The relative power of the beta band of ages 14-17 was greater than that of ages 6-9 in the whole brain. In asymmetry evaluation, relative power of the theta band in ages 14-17 showed greater power in the left than right frontal compartment; the opposite finding was noted in the parietal compartment. For the alpha band, a strong relative power distribution in the left parietal compartment was observed in ages 14-17. Absolute and relative power of the alpha band is distributed with hemispheric left lateralization in ages 14-17. Conclusion: During the gap period between ages 6-9 and ages 14-17, brain work becomes more complicated and sophisticated, and alpha band and beta band plays important roles in brain maturation in typically developing children.