Browsing by Author "Alifano, Florencia"
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Publication Multimodal Neurocognitive Markers of Naturalistic Discourse Typify Diverse Neurodegenerative Diseases(2022) Birba, Agustina; Fittipaldi, Sol; Cediel Escobar, Judith C.; Gonzalez Campo, Cecilia; Legaz, Agustina; Galiani, Agostina; Díaz Rivera, Mariano N.; Martorell Caro, Miquel; Alifano, Florencia; Piña-Escudero, Stefanie D.; Cardona, Juan Felipe; Neely, Alejandra; Forno, Gonzalo; Carpinella , Mariela; Slachevsky Chonchol, Andrea; Serrano, Cecilia; Sedeño, Lucas; Ibáñez, Agustín; García, Adolfo M.Neurodegeneration has multiscalar impacts, including behavioral, neuroanatomical, and neurofunctional disruptions. Can disease-differential alterations be captured across such dimensions using naturalistic stimuli? To address this question, we assessed comprehension of four naturalistic stories, highlighting action, nonaction, social, and nonsocial events, in Parkinson's disease (PD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) relative to Alzheimer's disease patients and healthy controls. Text-specific correlates were evaluated via voxel-based morphometry, spatial (fMRI), and temporal (hd-EEG) functional connectivity. PD patients presented action-text deficits related to the volume of action-observation regions, connectivity across motor-related and multimodal-semantic hubs, and frontal hd-EEG hypoconnectivity. BvFTD patients exhibited social-text deficits, associated with atrophy and spatial connectivity patterns along social-network hubs, alongside right frontotemporal hd-EEG hypoconnectivity. Alzheimer's disease patients showed impairments in all stories, widespread atrophy and spatial connectivity patterns, and heightened occipitotemporal hd-EEG connectivity. Our framework revealed disease-specific signatures across behavioral, neuroanatomical, and neurofunctional dimensions, highlighting the sensitivity and specificity of a single naturalistic task. This investigation opens a translational agenda combining ecological approaches and multimodal cognitive neuroscience for the study of neurodegeneration.Item Towards affordable biomarkers of frontotemporal dementia: A classification study via network's information sharing(Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Dottori, Martin; Sedeño, Lucas; Martorell, Miguel; Alifano, Florencia; Hesse, Eugenia; Mikulan, Ezequiel; García, Adolfo; Ruiz-Tagle, Amparo; Lillo, Patricia; Slachevsky, Andrea; Serrano, Cecilia; Fraiman, Daniel; Ibañez, AgustinDeveloping effective and affordable biomarkers for dementias is critical given the difficulty to achieve early diagnosis. In this sense, electroencephalographic (EEG) methods offer promising alternatives due to their low cost, portability, and growing robustness. Here, we relied on EEG signals and a novel information-sharing method to study resting-state connectivity in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and controls. To evaluate the specificity of our results, we also tested Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. The classification power of the ensuing connectivity patterns was evaluated through a supervised classification algorithm (support vector machine). In addition, we compared the classification power yielded by (i) functional connectivity, (ii) relevant neuropsychological tests, and (iii) a combination of both. BvFTD patients exhibited a specific pattern of hypoconnectivity in mid-range frontotemporal links, which showed no alterations in AD patients. These functional connectivity alterations in bvFTD were replicated with a low-density EEG setting (20 electrodes). Moreover, while neuropsychological tests yielded acceptable discrimination between bvFTD and controls, the addition of connectivity results improved classification power. Finally, classification between bvFTD and AD patients was better when based on connectivity than on neuropsychological measures. Taken together, such findings underscore the relevance of EEG measures as potential biomarker signatures for clinical settings.