Most such cases of bilateral basal ganglia infarction reported previously have no known established cause. The patient denied using 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA or “Ecstasy”), a substance which has very rarely been reported to be associated with basal ganglia infarction (Hanyu et al., 1995). Healthy volunteers, [19 male, non-colour blind, mean age = 41 (SD 5.7); 12 right-handed] were recruited Selleck PD 332991 by

website advertisement and from the UCL Psychology Department’s subject pool, with local ethics committee approval. They completed both experimental tasks during a 1 h testing session. On the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale [BIS-11 (Patton et al., 1995)] their mean total score find more was 65.3 (SD 11.6). Written consent was obtained from all test subjects, according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The research studies reported here with KD started 9 months after his initial strokes. T1-weighted MR acquisitions of KD’s brain were obtained at 1 × 1 × 1 mm resolution (Fig. 2A and B) on a 1.5 T Sonata Scanner (Siemens). Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) was performed with an echo

planar sequence comprising a double spin-echo module to reduce the effect of eddy currents (Reese et al., 2003). Each data volume consisted of 40 axial slices of 2.3 mm thickness with no interslice gaps and an acquisition matrix of 96 × 96 in a field of view (FoV) of 220 × 220 mm, resulting in 2.3 mm3 isotropic voxels [echo time (TE), 90 msec; flip angle, 90°; fat saturation; bandwidth, 2003 Hz/pixel]. Each dataset consisted of 61 high-diffusion-weighted images (b = 1000 sec/mm2), with diffusion gradients applied Dolutegravir in vitro along 61 evenly distributed diffusion directions obtained from a previously reported optimization procedure ( Jansons and Alexander, 2003) and seven additional images with minimal diffusion weighting (b = 100 sec/mm2) and

evenly distributed directions. The diffusion tensor was fitted using a standard linear least squares fit to the log measurements ( Basser et al., 1994). Additionally, the fitting provides an effective b = 0 image. We also acquired high-resolution T1-weighted structural data using the modified driven equilibrium Fourier transform sequence [176 slices; 1 mm3 isotropic voxels; sagittal, phase encoding in anterior/posterior; FoV, 224 × 256 mm; matrix, 224 × 256; repetition time, 20.66 msec; TE, 8.42 msec; inversion time, 640 msec; flip angle, 25°; fat saturation; bandwidth, 178 Hz/pixel] ( Deichmann, 2006). Several recent human atlases were used to establish the extent of KD’s lesions. Note that atrophy secondary to neuronal degeneration means that there is distortion of normal anatomy, in addition to the lesions themselves. It is therefore important to be familiar with such changes when interpreting these images. KD’s lesions largely involved the GPi, more prominently on the left.