Jorge Jovicich

• Professor
• Professor at University of Trento

Free water elimination (FWE) in brain diffusion MRI has been shown to improve tissue specificity in human white matter characterization both in health and in disease. Relative to the classical diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) model, FWE is also expected to increase sensitivity to microstructural changes in longitudinal studies. However, it is not cle...

Background: The use of concurrent EEG-fMRI recordings has increased in recent years, allowing new avenues of medical and cognitive neuroscience research; however, currently used setups present problems with data quality and reproducibility. New method: We propose a compact experimental setup for concurrent EEG-fMRI at 4T and compare it to a more...

Sleep has been shown to subtly disrupt the spatial organization of functional connectivity networks in the brain, but in a way that largely preserves the connectivity within sensory cortices. Here we evaluated the hypothesis that sleeps does impact sensory cortices, but through alteration of activity dynamics. We therefore examined the impact of sl...

We studied a group of verbal memory specialists to determine whether intensive oral text memory is associated with structural features of hippocampal and lateral-temporal regions implicated in language processing. Professional Vedic Sanskrit Pandits in India train from childhood for around 10 years in an ancient, formalized tradition of oral Sanskr...

Understanding how to reduce the influence of physiological noise in resting state fMRI data is important for the interpretation of functional brain connectivity. Limited data is currently available to assess the performance of physiological noise correction techniques, in particular when evaluating longitudinal changes in the default mode network (...

INTRODUCTION Whether Alzheimer's disease pathology involves white matter pathways connecting the locus coeruleus (LC) to the entorhinal cortex (EC) is unclear. In this cross‐sectional observational study, we investigated the microstructural integrity of the LC–EC pathway in relation to amyloid, tau, and neurodegeneration (ATN) biomarkers along the...

Determining the validity and reliability of a test is crucial when the results inform clinical decision-making. Voets et al. highlight priority areas where progress is needed to resolve long-standing controversies surrounding clinical applications of functional MRI in neurosurgery.

Recent studies have reported social cognitive deficits, particularly in emotional processing, in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, a comprehensive characterization of these deficits and their underlying neural correlates remains elusive. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the association between deficits in the recognition of complex mental...

Functional brain fingerprinting has emerged as an influential tool to quantify reliability in neuroimaging studies and to identify cognitive biomarkers in both healthy and clinical populations. Recent studies have revealed that brain fingerprints reside in the timescale‐specific functional connectivity of particular brain regions. However, the impa...

Ample reports highlight fMRI’s added value to guide neurosurgical interventions near brain regions supporting speech and language. However, fMRI’s usefulness for clinical language mapping remains controversial, partly fueled by 1) differences from clinical standard tools it is often compared against, and 2) wide heterogeneity in how data are acquir...

Background This study investigated microstructural features of the locus coeruleus to entorhinal cortex pathway (LC‐EC) in relation to amyloid (A), tau (T), neurodegeneration (N) markers and cognitive impairment in memory clinic patients. Method 124 participants were recruited from the Geneva Memory Clinic (n=30 cognitively unimpaired – CU; n=80 M...

Background Hippocampal atrophy is an established biomarker of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease, affecting specific subfields (De Flores, La Joie and Chételat, 2015). In this study, we used 7T MRI and advanced diffusion MRI (dMRI) to investigate the relationship between hippocampal subfield volumes and microstructure and assess their sensiti...

Background This study investigated microstructural features of the locus coeruleus to entorhinal cortex pathway (LC‐EC) in relation to amyloid (A), tau (T), neurodegeneration (N) markers and cognitive impairment in memory clinic patients. Method 124 participants were recruited from the Geneva Memory Clinic (n=30 cognitively unimpaired – CU; n=80 M...

The thalamus is a collection of gray matter nuclei that play a crucial role in sensorimotor processing and modulation of cortical activity. Characterizing thalamic nuclei non‐invasively with structural MRI is particularly relevant for patient populations with Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, dementia, and schizophrenia. However, severe head motion in...

The balance between neural excitation and inhibition (EIB) is an essential mechanism underlying cognitive processes. Yet, little is understood about how EIB shifts with cognitive load and its impact on functional connectivity dynamics. We investigate temporal profiles of the reciprocal modulation between EIB and functional network dynamics during w...

Introduction Distinguishing between frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in their early stages remains a significant clinical challenge. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers (total Tau, phosphorylated Tau, and beta-amyloid) are promising candidates for identifying early differences between these conditions. Method This study...

The thalamus is a collection of gray matter nuclei that play a crucial role in sensorimotor processing and modulation of cortical activity. Characterizing thalamic nuclei non-invasively with structural MRI is particularly relevant for patient populations with Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, dementia, and schizophrenia. However, severe head motion in...

Ample reports highlight fMRI’s added value to guide and tailor neurosurgical interventions near brain regions supporting speech and language. However, fMRI’s usefulness for clinical language mapping remains controversial. This controversy is partly fueled by 1) differences between fMRI and the tools it is often compared against, and 2) wide heterog...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Precise mapping of functional networks in patients with brain tumor is essential for tailoring personalized treatment strategies. Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) offers an alternative to task-based fMRI, capable of capturing multiple networks within a single acquisition, without necessitating task engagement. This s...

Pharmacological treatments in Parkinson’s disease (PD), albeit effective in alleviating many motor symptoms, have limited effects in non-motor signatures as cognitive impairment, as well as in other aspects included postural instability. Consequently, complementary interventions are nowadays a prerogative of clinical practice managing PD symptomato...

Purpose T1 mapping is a widely used quantitative MRI technique, but its tissue‐specific values remain inconsistent across protocols, sites, and vendors. The ISMRM Reproducible Research and Quantitative MR study groups jointly launched a challenge to assess the reproducibility of a well‐established inversion‐recovery T1 mapping technique, using acqu...

Background Postoperative short-term attentional and executive dysfunctions are common after brain tumor resection, significantly impacting patients’ quality of life and functional recovery. The current study investigated whether presurgical functional dynamics of key brain networks supporting executive functioning could predict postoperative neurop...

Motivation: Our primary aim is to enhance non-invasive tissue-microstructure characterization as a diagnostic paradigm through advanced MRI methods. Goal(s): We explore microscopic tortuosity in human white-matter using the Non-uniform Oscillating-Gradient Spin-Echo (NOGSE) contrast in a clinical 3T MRI-scanner. Approach: The NOGSE contrast was o...

Background/Objective. Enlarged lateral ventricle (LV) volume and decreased volume in the corpus callosum (CC) are hallmarks of schizophrenia (SZ). We previously showed an inverse correlation between LV and CC volumes in SZ, with global functioning decreasing with increased LV volume. This study investigates the relationship between LV volume, CC ab...

Background In Alzheimer’s disease, pathological phosphorylation of tau protein destabilizes microtubules affecting the neural cytoskeleton organization (Kolarova et al., 2012). In this study, we investigated correlates of Alzheimer’s tau pathology and white matter (WM) microstructure using diffusion MRI (dMRI) advanced models to detect tau‐related...

Marčenko-Pastur PCA (MPPCA) denoising is emerging as an effective means for noise suppression in MR imaging (MRI) acquisitions with redundant dimensions. However, MPPCA performance can be severely compromised by spatially correlated noise—an issue typically affecting most modern MRI acquisitions—almost to the point of returning the original images...

Functional brain fingerprinting has emerged as an influential tool to quantify reliability in neuroimaging studies and to identify cognitive biomarkers in both healthy and clinical populations. Recent studies have revealed that brain fingerprints reside in the timescale-specific functional connectivity of particular brain regions. However, the impa...

In Parkinson's disease (PD), impairment of Theory of Mind (ToM) has recently attracted an increasing number of neuroscientific investigations. If and how functional connectivity of the ToM network is altered in PD is still an open question. First, we explored whether ToM network connectivity shows potential PD-specific functional alterations when c...

In clinical neuroscience, the segmentation of the main white matter bundles is a mandatory premise for pre-operative neurosurgical planning, neuro-rehabilitation prognosis and monitoring of neuro-related diseases. The automation of the task of bundle segmentation is achieving a good accuracy on healthy individuals taking advantage of data driven ap...

Patients with unilateral spatial neglect (USN) are unable to explore or to report stimuli presented in the left personal and extra-personal space. USN is usually caused by lesion of the right parietal lobe: nowadays, it is also clear the key role of structural connections (the second and the third branch of the right Superior Longitudinal Fasciculu...

Magnetic resonance imaging is one of the most widely used methods for non-invasive medical imaging. Gradient modulation sequences can selectively extract quantitative information at micrometer and sub-micrometer scales that might be relevant for clinical applications. We approach this topic using white matter phantoms by observing the contrast gene...

Marčenko-Pastur (MP) PCA denoising is emerging as an effective means for noise suppression in MRI acquisitions with redundant dimensions. However, MP-PCA performance is severely compromised by spatially correlated noise — an issue typically affecting most modern MRI acquisitions — almost to the point of returning the original images with little or...

The Harmonized Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia for the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI-DAD) is a nationally representative in-depth study of cognitive aging and dementia. We present a publicly available dataset of harmonized cognitive measures of 4,096 adults 60 years of age and older in India, collected across 18 states and union territo...

In the last decade, the exclusive role of the hippocampus in human declarative learning has been challenged. Recently, we have shown that gains in performance observed in motor sequence learning (MSL) during the quiet rest periods interleaved with practice are associated with increased hippocampal activity, suggesting a role of this structure in mo...

An open discussion in studies of intrinsic brain functional connectivity is the mitigation of head motion-related artifacts, particularly in the presence of peculiar symptomatology such as in Parkinson's disease (PD). Previous studies show that Independent Component Analysis (ICA) denoising improves the reproducibility of functional connectivity fi...

Tractography is a powerful method to represent the structural connectivity of the brain white matter. Nevertheless, the comparison of these data structures between two individuals is still an open challenge because of their complexity, e.g. digital representation of millions of fibers as polylines. The scientific community spent a meaningful effort...

The locus coeruleus (LC) is a brainstem nucleus thought to undergo early microstructural and functional connectivity changes in Alzheimer's disease. The in vivo assessment of LC changes is however limited by the resolution of current 3T MRI systems. Here we used high-resolution high-field diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) and resting-state fMRI in c...

hMT+/V5 is a region in the middle occipito-temporal cortex that responds preferentially to visual motion in sighted people. In case of early visual deprivation, hMT+/V5 enhances its response to moving sounds. Whether hMT+/V5 contains information about motion directions and whether the functional enhancement observed in the blind is motion specific,...

The Correlation Tensor MRI (CTI) framework has been recently formulated to disentangle anisotropic, isotropic, and microscopic kurtosis sources without a priori assumptions from Double-Diffusion-Encoding (DDE) data. In this work, group average maps (templates) are presented for the first time, thereby mapping the contrasts for anisotropic and isotr...

The study of patients after glioma resection offers a unique opportunity to investigate brain reorganization. It is currently unknown how the whole-brain connectomic profile evolves longitudinally after surgical resection of a glioma and how this may be associated with tumor characteristics and cognitive outcome. In this longitudinal study, we inve...

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) has become one of the most important imaging modalities for noninvasively probing tissue microstructure. Diffusional Kurtosis MRI (DKI) quantifies the degree of non-gaussian diffusion, which in turn has been shown to increase sensitivity towards, e.g., disease and orientation mapping in neural tissue. However, the specificity o...

The BDNF Val66Met gene polymorphism is a relevant factor explaining inter-individual differences to TMS responses in studies of the motor system. However, whether this variant also contributes to TMS-induced memory effects, as well as their underlying brain mechanisms, remains unexplored. In this investigation, we applied rTMS during encoding of a...

Proton beam therapy (PBT) is an effective pediatric brain tumor treatment. However, the resulting microstructural changes within and around irradiated tumors are unknown. We retrospectively applied diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and free-water imaging (FWI) on diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) data to monitor microstructural chan...

Background Deep learning approaches for classification have the advantage of automatically learning the relevant features but require large amount of data for training. We test the efficacy of deep learning approach for prediction of risk factor for prodromal Alzheimer’s disease from whole brain MRI scans segmented into grey/white matter and CSF im...

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the presence of beta-amyloid (Aβ42) and phosphorylated tau (P-tau) deposits in the brain, neurodegeneration in specific brain regions, and inflammation. This study aimed at investigating the association of periferal inflammatory signaling with brain structural al...

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) has become one of the most important imaging modalities for noninvasively probing tissue microstructure. Diffusion Kurtosis MRI (DKI) quantifies the degree of non-gaussian diffusion, which in turn has been shown to increase sensitivity towards, e.g. , disease and orientation mappings in neural tissue. However, the specificity o...

Background: Graph metrics of structural brain networks demonstrate to be a powerful tool for investigating brain topology at a large scale. However, the variability of the results related to applying different magnetic resonance acquisition schemes and tractography reconstruction techniques is not fully characterized. Methods: The present work a...

hMT+/V5 is a region in the middle occipito-temporal cortex that responds preferentially to visual motion in sighted people. In case of early visual deprivation, hMT+/V5 enhances its response to moving sounds. Whether hMT+/V5 contains information about motion directions and whether the functional enhancement observed in the blind is motion specific,...

Background Previous studies reported default mode network (DMN) and limbic network (LIN) brain perfusion deficits in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), frequently a prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the validity of these measures as AD markers has not yet been tested using MRI arterial spin labeling (ASL)....

Background The mechanisms driving primary progressive and relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis (PPMS/RRMS) phenotypes are unknown. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies support the involvement of gray matter (GM) in the degeneration, highlighting its damage as an early feature of both phenotypes. However, the role of GM microstructure is uncle...

Resolving the underlying sources of kurtosis in biological systems is emerging as a promising strategy for non-invasive quantitative characterization of tissue microstructure. Recently, a novel framework termed Correlation Tensor Imaging (CTI), based on double-diffusion-encoding MRI, was shown to disentangle anisotropic, isotropic, and microscopic...

Whether gray matter (GM) regions are differentially vulnerable in Relapsing-Remitting and Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (RRMS and PPMS) is still unknown. The objective of this study was to evaluate morphometric and microstructural properties based on structural and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) data in these MS phenotypes, an...

Background Proton beam therapy (PBT) is an effective pediatric brain tumor treatment. However, resulting microstructural changes within and around irradiated tumors are unknown. We retrospectively applied Diffusion-Tensor-Imaging (DTI) and Free-Water-Imaging (FWI) on diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) data to monitor microstructur...

Brain vascular damage accumulate in aging and often manifest as white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) on MRI. Despite increased interest in automated methods to segment WMHs, a gold standard has not been achieved and their longitudinal reproducibility has been poorly investigated. The aim of present work is to evaluate accuracy and reproducibility o...

Background Patterns of coordinated variations of gray matter (GM) morphology across individuals are promising indicators of disease. However, it remains unclear if they can help characterize first-episode psychosis (FEP) and symptoms’ severity. Methods Sixty-seven FEP and 67 matched healthy controls (HC) were assessed with structural MRI to evalua...

Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, 38068, Italy, and 3Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Charlestown, Massachusetts 01129 In humans, the occipital middle-temporal region (hMT1/V5) specializes in the processing of visual motion, while the planum te...

Accurate and reproducible automated segmentation of human hippocampal subfields is of interest to study their roles in cognitive functions and disease processes. Multispectral structural MRI methods have been proposed to improve automated hippocampal subfield segmentation accuracy, but the reproducibility in a multicentric setting is, to date, not...

Background Having ways to quickly assess cognitive impairment is critical for developing nations. Here we examine how different combinations of neuropsychiatric tests identify cognitive impairment using the Longitudinal Aging Study in India ‐ Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia (LASI‐DAD). We then investigate for brain regions that show structural mo...

Background Increasing evidence suggests that neurodegeneration of the locus coeruleus (LC) is an early pathological feature of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). However, assessment of the LC in‐vivo is hampered by its small size. Here we test the feasibility of characterizing LC’s integrity in‐vivo using ultra‐high field MRI. Method Eight young controls (...

Background The amygdala and the hippocampus are two limbic structures that play a critical role in cognition and behaviour but their small size hampers their manual segmentation in multicenter datasets. Here, we assessed the reliability of the automated segmentation of amygdalar nuclei and hippocampal subfields across sites and vendors. We applied...

Background Age‐related cognitive decline is widely documented, but with substantial individual differences that are not yet understood (Vaque‐Alcazar et al., 2017). Using the recently collected neuroimaging data from the Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia for the Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI‐DAD), we investigate the associations between c...

Significance Learning predefined sequences of actions is of everyday importance. Recent evidence suggests that improvements in performance associated with learning a motor sequence take place during the quiet rest periods interleaved with practice. This phenomenon known as micro-offline gains (MOGs) is different from offline gains in performance ob...

In Double-Diffusion-Encoding sequences, concomitant gradients may introduce spatial bias in the measured MRI signal. It is important to characterize such biases since they can affect the accuracy of quantitative microstructural metrics in brain studies. In this work, we assess the signal deviations at different positions along the scanner z-axis in...

Abstract The Harmonized Diagnostic Assessment of Dementia for Longitudinal Aging Study in India (LASI-DAD) is a population-representative, prospective cohort study of late-life cognition and dementia. It is part of an ongoing international research collaboration that aims to measure and understand cognitive impairment and dementia risk by collectin...

Anxiety is a mental state characterized by an intense sense of tension, worry or apprehension, relative to something adverse that might happen in the future. Researchers differentiate aspects of anxiety into state and trait, respectively defined as a more transient reaction to an adverse situation, and as a more stable personality attribute in expe...

In humans, the occipital middle-temporal region (hMT+/V5) specializes in the processing of visual motion, while the Planum Temporale (hPT) specializes in auditory motion processing. It has been hypothesized that these regions might communicate directly to achieve fast and optimal exchange of multisensory motion information. In this study, we invest...

Background The amygdala and the hippocampus are two limbic structures that play a critical role in cognition and behavior, however their manual segmentation and that of their smaller nuclei/subfields in multicenter datasets is time consuming and difficult due to the low contrast of standard MRI. Here, we assessed the reliability of the automated se...

Background: Fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) are frequently used to evaluate longitudinal changes in white matter (WM) microstructure. Recently, there has been a growing interest in identifying experience-dependent plasticity in gray matter using MD. Improving registration has thus become a major goal to enhance the detection o...

Amyloid and tau pathological accumulation should be considered for Alzheimer's disease (AD) definition and before subjects' enrollment in disease-modifying trials. Although age, APOEε4, and sex influence cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarker levels, none of these variables are considered by current normality/abnormality cutoffs. Using baseline CSF da...

Introduction: The goal of European Ultrahigh-Field Imaging Network in Neurodegenerative Diseases (EUFIND) is to identify opportunities and challenges of 7 Tesla (7T) MRI for clinical and research applications in neurodegeneration. EUFIND comprises 22 European and one US site, including over 50 MRI and dementia experts as well as neuroscientists....

The quench of a human magnetic resonance imaging system is a critical event that may occur spontaneously, as an accident or purposely in response to an emergency. Although a magnet’s quench presents its own risks, little experimental data is available in this respect. In this study, the programmed quench of a human MRI scanner was used to measure t...

Introduction: The implementation of spatial-covariance [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography-based disease-related metabolic brain patterns as biomarkers has been hampered by intercenter imaging differences. Within the scope of the JPND-PETMETPAT working group, we illustrate the impact of these differences on Parkinson's disease-rel...

Psychosis is a disorder that causes partial loss of contact with external reality in daily activities1. Neuroimaging studies have shown grey matter (GM) modifications associated with early manifestations of psychosis2. This motivates the study of neuroimaging markers that may be used as complementary clinical information for more precise differenti...

Deafness is usually accompanied by functional brain alterations that may be thought as an alteration to connectome scaffolding1,2,3. The general goal of this study was to investigate brain structural network organization in early and profoundly deaf subjects (ED). The specific goal was to apply the structural white matter connectome formalism to ev...

Introduction: An increasing number of studies are using magnetoencephalography (MEG) to study dementia. Here we define a common methodological framework for MEG resting-state acquisition and analysis to facilitate the pooling of data from different sites. Methods: Two groups of patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 84) and healthy co...

Introduction: Heterogeneity of segmentation protocols for medial temporal lobe regions and hippocampal subfields on in vivo magnetic resonance imaging hinders the ability to integrate findings across studies. We aim to develop a harmonized protocol based on expert consensus and histological evidence. Methods: Our international working group, fun...

In this study we investigate the neural basis of emotional content in self-referential processing by using a combination of off-line repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) applied to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and whole-brain functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).We applied effective or ineffective (sham) 1-Hz rTMS to t...

Synopsis In case of early acquired deafness, auditory deprived temporal regions massively enhance their response to stimuli from remaining senses. This so called cross-modal plasticity also alters functional connectivity between reorganized temporal regions and those from preserved senses. The extent and distribution of white matter structural alte...