Search Results (5)

Background and Clinical Significance: Cavum septum pellucidum (CSP) and cavum vergae (CV) are anatomical variations that may persist into childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. When these cavities become abnormally large, they are classified as cysts. The mechanism leading to expansion is poorly understood. Although rare, symptomatic CSP and CV cysts can present with a wide range of clinical manifestations. Case Presentation: A 20-year-old Caucasian male presented with progressively worsening symptoms over several months including persistent headaches and dizziness. Neurological evaluation showed no abnormalities, with intact cranial nerve function, normal muscle strength, and no signs of paresis. Imaging identified CSP and CV cysts causing obstructive hydrocephalus. MRI findings confirmed progressive cyst enlargement and obstruction of intraventricular foramen. The patient underwent neuroendoscopic fenestration of the cyst with resolution of both hydrocephalus and the symptoms. A CT and MRI scan of the brain performed 12 years before revealed a developmental variant, showing no evidence of cyst formation or ventricular enlargement and without hydrocephalus at that time. This case provides a rare opportunity to observe cyst growth dynamics over time. Conclusions: This case presents the importance of recognizing symptomatic CSP and CV cysts as rare but significant causes of obstructive hydrocephalus. The progression from a developmental variant to cyst formation over time illustrates the value of long-term imaging follow-up in such cases. Neuroendoscopic fenestration provided complete resolution of symptoms, demonstrating the effectiveness of surgical intervention in such cases. Full article

Background: Midline cysts of the brain are comprised of the following entities, septum pellucidum cysts, cavum vergae cysts and velum interpositum cysts. These lesions are uncommon and often asymptomatic; nonetheless, certain clinical manifestations may be linked to midline cysts, including headaches, signs of elevated intracranial pressure, neurological deficits, or alterations in mental status. Controversy persists in the therapy of symptomatic cases, mostly due to the challenge of establishing a correlation between the symptomatology and the presence of the cyst. Case description: We present the case of a 64-year-old female known with type—1 neurofibromatosis that associated a midline cyst. The cyst was treated endoscopically, in the initial stage (single wall perforation) showed no clinical or imagistic improvement. The incriminated symptoms in these cases are caused not only by compression or obstruction of the CSF flow but also to a complex alteration of CSF dynamics, in this case the stoma was found permeable at the second surgery but there was no obvious communication on the preoperative evaluation by ventriculocisternostomy. A second surgery was performed, with bilateral perforation and subsequent improvement of symptomatology and decrease of cyst dimensions. A literature review is presented concerning clinical presentation, therapeutic options, and possible outcomes. Conclusions: Endoscopic fenestration is an efficacious method for treating midline cysts, with bilateral wall fenestration representing the standard practice. Understanding the anatomical and developmental specifics of the septal region, together with cerebrospinal fluid dynamics, is essential for effective treatment of this condition. Full article

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is a prevalent medical complication in pregnancy that is rapidly escalating worldwide, with epidemic implications. This systematic review aims to identify fetal brain changes using neurosonography and pinpoint potential markers for the early diagnosis of GDM. We conducted a literature search from 6 January 2013 to 4 September 2024 to identify studies examining fetal brain development using ultrasound in pregnancies affected by GDM compared to uncomplicated pregnancies. The outcome measures included the cavum septum pellucidum (CSP), corpus callosum (CC), lateral ventricle (LV), cisterna magna (CM), transcerebellar diameter (TCD), cerebral fissures (CF), and others. For pregnancies affected by GDM, results were reported. Five studies were included. The findings suggest that the width of the CSP was larger in fetuses of mothers with GDM compared to the control group, and the mean widths of LVs were also larger in the fetuses of diabetic mothers compared to the control group. The influence of GDM on fetal brain development as assessed by neurosonography necessitates thorough investigation in future studies. Full article

The aims of this study were to assess the common anomalies in the MRI examinations of the heads of soldiers as well as to compare the relative concentration of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) metabolites in the brains of soldiers with those of healthy age-matched controls. Overall, 54 professional male soldiers were included in the study group and 46 healthy, age-matched males were in the control group. The relative values of N-acetylaspartate (NAA), choline (Cho), and myoinositol (mI) to creatine (Cr) were assessed. The mean relative concentrations of metabolites were compared between the study and the control group, separately for the frontal and occipital lobes, as well as between the right and left hemispheres within the study group only. The most frequent findings in the head MRI of the soldiers were: asymmetric lateral ventricles and dilated perivascular spaces, enlargement of the subarachnoid spaces, and the presence of cavum septum pellucidum and cavum vergae; the high frequency of sinus disease should also be noted. In the frontal lobes, the mI/Cr ratio was significantly higher (p = 0.005), while the NAA/Cr ratio was lower (p = 0.001), in the group of soldiers (vs. the study group). In the occipital lobes, the NAA/Cr ratio was significantly lower (p = 0.005) in the military personnel and there was a tendency to a higher mI/Cr ratio in the soldiers’ occipital lobes (p = 0.056) (vs. the study group). Comparing the metabolites between the left and right hemispheres in soldiers preferring a right shooting position, a significantly higher mI/Cr (p < 0.001) ratio was observed in the right frontal lobe (vs. the left) and a markedly lower NAA/Cr (p = 0.003) in the right occipital lobe (vs. the left). These changes are associated with astrogliosis and neuronal loss, presumably secondary to repetitive mild traumatic brain injury. Full article

Cavum septum pellucidum (CSP) is one of the most important physiologic structures that should be detected in Ultrasound (US) scanning for the normal development of the fetal central nervous system. However, manual measurement of CSP is still a difficult and time-consuming task due to the high noise of US images, even for experienced sonographers. Especially considering that maternal mortality remains high in many developing countries, a data-driven system with a medical diagnosis can help sonographers and obstetricians make decisions rapidly and improve their work efficiency. In this study, we propose a novel data-driven system based on deep learning for the diagnosis of CSP called CA-Unet, which consists of a channel attention network to segment the CSP and a post-processing module to measure and diagnose the anomalies of CSP. We collected the US data from three hospitals in China from 2012 to 2018 year to validate the effectiveness of our system. Experiments on a fetal US dataset demonstrated that our proposed system is able to help doctors make decisions and has achieved the highest precision of 79.5% and the largest Dice score of 77.5% in the segmentation of CSP. Full article