Thalamic neurons projecting to both the head of the caudate nucleus and the premotor cortex in the cat were studied by the retrograde fluorescent double labeling technique. After injections of Evans blue into the caudate nucleus, and diamidino-phenylindol into the premotor cortex, a small number of double labeled neurons appeared in the ventral anterior, ventral lateral, anteromedial, rhomboid,...

Combined lesions of retinal targets and ascending auditory pathways can induce, in developing animals, permanent retinal projections to auditory thalamic nuclei and to visual thalamic nuclei that normally receive little direct retinal input. Neurons in the auditory cortex of such animals have visual response properties that resemble those of neurons in the primary visual cortex of normal animal...

The rostral sector of the posterior thalamic nuclei (POm) is, together with the ventral posterior nuclei (VP), involved in somatosensory information processing in rodents. The POm receives inputs from the spinal cord and trigeminal nuclei and projects to the primary somatosensory (S1) cortex and other cortical areas. Although thalamocortical axons of single VP neurons are well known to innervat...

Introduction: Fast and accurate segmentation of thalamic nuclei is important for clinical applications such as treatment of Parkinson's disease or chronic pain syndrome for example. The intrinsic contrast in standard anatomical MR images in the thalamus is very low, therefore direct segmentation of thalamic nuclei is not possible. Since thalamic nuclei have a distinct and well-ordered fiber str...

The primary and secondary damage to neural tissue inflicted by traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of death and disability. The secondary processes, in particular, are of great clinical interest because of their potential susceptibility to intervention. We address the dynamics of tissue degeneration in cortico-subcortical circuits after severe brain injury by assessing volume change in in...

The thalamus consists of multiple nuclei that have been previously defined by their chemoarchitectual and cytoarchitectual properties ex vivo. These form discrete, functionally specialized, territories with topographically arranged graduated patterns of connectivity. However, previous in vivo thalamic parcellation with MRI has been hindered by substantial inter-individual variability or discrep...

The idea that dorsal thalamic inputs can be divided into "drivers", which provide the primary excitatory drive for the relay of information to cortex, and "modulators", which alter the gain of signal transmission, has provided a valuable organizing principle for the study of thalamic function. This view further promoted the identification of "first order" and "higher order" thalamic nuclei, bas...

Lesions of the rodent anterior thalamic nuclei cause severe deficits to multiple spatial learning tasks. Possible explanations for these effects are examined, with particular reference to T-maze alternation. Anterior thalamic lesions not only impair allocentric place learning but also disrupt other spatial processes, including direction learning, path integration, and relative length discrimina...

The specific neural substrate underlying the amnesia in alcoholic Korsakoff's psychosis is poorly defined because of the considerable brain damage found in many non-amnesic alcoholics, particularly those with Wernicke's encephalopathy. Using operational criteria to identify alcoholics with and without Korsakoff's psychosis, we have shown that many of the cortical and subcortical regions involve...

Afferent subcortical connections to the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the dog were investigated using the horseradish peroxidase retrograde transport method. The dorsal and ventral regions of the medial PFC receive different projections both from the mediodorsal and the ventral thalamic nuclei. The dorsomedial PFC receives projection from a dorsolateral region of the "parvocellular" MD subd...