Faculty Bibliography

Brain metabolism was measured with positron emission tomography and [11C]deoxyglucose during baseline and during a visual task in 12 normal subjects and 18 schizophrenic patients. Global measures of metabolism for 11 brain regions were transformed into relative values by dividing them by the metabolic value for whole brain. Factor analysis was accomplished on the matrix of intercorrelations among the relative regional values for the normal and for the schizophrenic patients under baseline and under the task. Four factors that revealed independently varying metabolism in frontal, occipital, left-versus-right hemisphere, and subcortical structures were obtained. The frontal and subcortical factors discriminated between normal subjects and schizophrenic patients, whereas the occipital factor discriminated between baseline and task. Although activity in these individual regions varied significantly, it was the pattern of differences in regional metabolic activity that best discriminated between diagnostic groups and testing conditions

A theoretical argument proposes that thresholds for visual perception of movement should be abnormally high in schizophrenia. This may reflect a central vestibular dysfunction, consisting of abnormally high levels of extraneous noise within the neural activity of the central vestibulo-cerebellar complex. Two experiments are reported with results that support the hypothesis. To some extent, the disorder may explain the smooth pursuit eye movement dysfunction in schizophrenia. Relations to the dopamine hypothesis in schizophrenia are discussed

A large and diverse set of experiments is run by a single data acquisition program. The resulting single-output file format encompassing all possible experimental paradigms allows a corresponding single program to be written to extract data from these files to accumulate descriptive statistics. The resulting analysis program provides a general-purpose data extraction language with which the user specifies the desired classes of data to be formed into lists for further operations by the program. The language structure incorporates the natural hierarchy of the data base structure itself and provides a record-specifier syntax with which the class of records at each level of the hierarchy may be selected. Arithmetic, comparison, logical, statistical, and list processing functions are provided that allow array arguments to produce arrays of functional evaluations. These functions can be nested and otherwise combined into expressions to further define classes of data