Angelika Maurer

• Dr. rer. nat.
• University of Bonn

Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) thalamotomy in essential tremor (ET) targets the ventral intermediate nucleus hub region within the cerebello-thalamo-cortical tract (CTCT). Understanding the microstructural changes in the CTCT over time and their link to tremor improvement is crucial from a tremor-network perspective. We retro...

Introduction: Essential tremor (ET) is a progressive disorder characterized by altered network connectivity between the cerebellum, thalamus, and cortical regions. Magnetic Resonanceguided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) of the ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) is an effective, minimally invasive treatment for ET. Increasing clinical use in ET facilit...

Introduction Physical activity influences psychological well-being. This study aimed to determine the impact of exercise intensity on psychological well-being and alterations in emotion-related brain functional connectivity (FC). Methods Twenty young, healthy, trained athletes performed a low- and high-intensity interval exercise (LIIE and HIIE) a...

Physical exercise studies are generally underrepresented in young adulthood. Seventeen subjects were randomized into an intervention group (24.2 ± 3.9 years; 3 trainings/week) and 10 subjects into a passive control group (23.7 ± 4.2 years), over a duration of 6 months. Every two months, performance diagnostics, computerized spatial memory tests, an...

Dopaminergic, opiod and endocannabinoid neurotransmission are thought to play an important role in the neurobiology of acute exercise and, in particular, in mediating positive affective responses and reward processes. Recent evidence indicates that changes in fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (zfALFF) in resting-state functional MR...

In this study, we evaluate the influence of normalization on the performance of deep learning networks for tumor segmentation and the prediction of the pathological response of locally advanced rectal cancer to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy. The techniques were applied to a multicenter and multimodal magnet resonance imaging data set consisting of...

Filter-decomposition-based group-equivariant convolutional neural networks (G-CNN) have been demonstrated to increase CNN's data efficiency and contribute to better interpretability and controllability of CNN models. However, so far filter-decomposition-based affine G-CNN methods rely on parameter sharing for achieving high parameter efficiency and...

Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) lesioning of the ventralis intermedius nucleus (VIM) has shown promise in treating drug-refractory essential tremor (ET). It remains unknown whether focal VIM lesions by MRgFUS have broader restorative effects on information flow within the whole-brain network of ET patients. We applied an infor...

Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in affect processing. Studies describe the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) as a major hub for emotion processing and the pathophysiology of affective disorders. Subregions of the OFC show diverse functional connectivity (FC) topographies, but the effect of chronic PA on subregional OFC FC still lacks scient...

Physical inactivity is documented as health risk factor for chronic diseases, accelerated aging and cognitive impairment. Physical exercise, on the other hand, plays an important role in healthy aging by promoting positive muscular, cardiovascular and central nervous system adaptions. Prior studies on the effects of exercise training on cerebral pe...

This retrospective study aims to evaluate the generalizability of a promising state-of-the-art multitask deep learning (DL) model for predicting the response of locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) using a multicenter dataset. To this end, we retrained and validated a Siamese network with two U-Nets joined a...

Background: Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound of the ventral intermediate nucleus is a novel incisionless ablative treatment for essential tremor (ET). Objective: The aim was to study the structural and functional network changes induced by unilateral sonication of the ventral intermediate nucleus in ET. Methods: Fifteen essential t...

Acute exercise has beneficial effects on mood and is known to induce modulations in functional connectivity (FC) within the emotional network. However, the long-term effects of exercise on affective brain circuits remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated the effects of 6 months of regular exercise on mood, amygdala structure, and functional co...

The aim of this study was to investigate central pain representations during loading of the periodontium induced by orthodontic and occlusal stress. Nineteen healthy male volunteers (25.7 ± 2.8 years) were tested on two consecutive days: after phenotyping (questionnaires) and determination of warmth (WPT) and heat (HPT) pain thresholds, functional...

Background Amyloid-β accumulation was found to alter precuneus-based functional connectivity (FC) in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia, but its impact is less clear in subjective cognitive decline (SCD), which in combination with AD pathologic change is theorized to correspond to stage 2 of the Alzheimer’s contin...

Background: An important motivation for adolescents and young adults to engage in aerobic exercise (AE) is to improve fitness, body composition and physical appearance. These parameters have an impact on bodily perception as conceptualized by the 'body image' (BI) construct. AE is known to have positive effects on pain perception, mood, and body im...

PurposeMagnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) systems are increasingly used to non-invasively treat tremor; consensus on imaging follow-up is poor in these patients. This study aims to elucidate how MRgFUS lesions evolve for a radiological readership with regard to clinical outcome.MethodsMRgFUS-induced lesions and oedema were retros...

Acute moderate exercise has been shown to induce prolonged changes in functional connectivity (FC) within affect and reward networks. The influence of different exercise intensities on FC has not yet been explored. Twenty-five male athletes underwent 30 min of “low”- ( (LT)) and “high”- () intensity exercise bouts on a treadmill. Resting-state fMRI...

Background: While cerebral beta-amyloid accumulation was found in many studies to alter precuneus-based functional connectivity (FC) in mild cognitive impairment and demented Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients, its impact is less well understood in subjective cognitive decline (SCD), which in the presence of underlying AD pathologic change correspon...

Background: The phenomenon of exercise-induced hypoalgesia and concomitant mood changes is well established. How exercise-induced hypoalgesia and affective responses are shaped by the intensity of an acute exercise bout and individual fitness levels is as yet not well understood. This study investigates whether heat pain threshold (PTh), pain tole...

Acute exercise bouts alter resting state functional connectivity (rs-FC) within cognitive, sensorimotor, and affective networks, but it remains unknown how these effects are influenced by exercise intensity. Twenty-five male athletes underwent individual fitness assessments using an incremental treadmill test. On separate days, they performed 'low'...

Physical exercise has positive effects on mood, reduces clinical depression and states of anxiety. While previous work mostly used subjective measures to study the effect of exercise upon emotions, this study for the first time employed BOLD fMRI to unravel associated neuronal changes of the emotional face-processing network in response to acute ex...