Sharif Digital Repository

Recently complex networks, have been widely used as a model to study the behavior of human brain. By affecting different parts the brain, Neuronal disorders change the structure of functional brain networks. Investigating these changes using different graph theory metrics can be a useful methodology for human brain analysis in health and disease. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neural disease causing impairment in different brain activities including memory and cognition.The aim of this study is to construct the functional brain network of 17 AD patients and 17 healthy control subjects at resting state condition and analyzing them using the theory of complex networks in order to achieve a... 

Localization of electrical activity in the brain is one of the major problems in cognitive science and neuroscience. Indeed, Source localization is the inverse processing procedure on brain signals to estimate the location and position of resources in the human brain. Current technics for neurological imaging is included fMRI، PET، MEG and ERP. These methods is not appropriated to answer the question that when does each of different components of the brain begin their activity. The EEG signals could be useful to eliminate some of limitations of above methods. The problem with EEG signals collected from the skull is that they don’t refer directly to the location of active neurons. The... 

Complex networks science have received tremendous attention in recent years and the brain is one of the systems to which graph theoretical tools have been applied. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting many of elderly population. AD changes the anatomy of the brain, which subsequently results in changes in its functions. These changes have been frequently reported in signals recorded from the brain (such as MEG, fMRI and EEG). Among these neuroimaging techniques EEG is one of the most aproprate methods for extracting functional connectivites according to high temporal resolution. In this thesis, we aimed at analyzing the properties of EEG-based functional networks... 

Dementia is one of the most common disorders among the elderly population. Statistical analyses show that among several subtypes of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most frequent cause of dementia and this number is projected to increase. AD not only results in impairment of learning and memory but also in the moderate stages of illness, motor functions are profoundly disturbed, and ultimately will affect the patient's lifetime. The proposed drug treatments for this disease only reduce its progress probability. Therefore, early diagnosis for effective treatment of Alzheimer's disease is one of the critical issues in the field of dementia. This project is an effort to extract... 

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease which results in synaptic depression and complete destruction in neurons in the final stages. Many pathogenesis has so far been attributed to AD but the most commonly explained pathomechanism is based on the amyloid cascade theory which results in formation of amyloid beta plaques outside and hyper phosphorylated neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein inside the neurons. One of the most well-known symptoms of AD is the disability to learn and form new memories and transform them into long term memory. The most commonly studied mechanism in memory formation, is the “long term potentiation”. Although many mechanisms and molecules are... 

There are currently about 50 million people with Alzheimer's disease in the world, and this number is about 700 thousand in Iran. The symptoms of the disease include decreased awareness, disinterest in unfamiliar subjects, increased distraction, speech problems, and etc. which gradually leads to an absolute inability to perform daily activities and completely mute. The disease belongs to the category of neurological disorders and is the most common type of dementia for which no treatment has been offered so far. However, if the disease is diagnosed in its early stage, a series of pharmacological and behavioral therapy approaches can be prescribed to reduce the pace or progression of the... 

Many experimental and theoretical studies have suggested that zinc binding to Aβ could promote amyloid-β aggregation and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production induced by AD disease. Therefore, the introduction of multifunctional drugs capable of chelating zinc metal ion and inhibiting Aβ aggregation is a promising strategy in the development of AD treatment. In present study molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were used to evaluate the efficacy of two new bifunctional peptide drug, composed of two different domains: C-terminal hydrophobic region of Aβ and Zn2+ chelator region. To evaluate the multifunctionality of the ligands, a comprehensive set of MD simulations up... 

Extensive studies have been performed on the genetic variations involved in common neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, macular degeneration, and Parkinson's. In most cases, no specific gene has been identified pointing to a distinct pathogenic pathway, therefore, this study mainly aims to find common genes among aforementioned diseases according to determination of a specific pathogenic protein pathway.In this study, we reached a deep understanding of the function of nervous system and the discovery of causative agents of the diseases by applying the sources of information from genome datasets in bioinformatics analysis. The utilized database comprises the classification of... 

High-frequency oscillations of the frontal cortex are involved in functions of the brain that fuse processed data from different sensory modules or bind them with elements stored in the memory. These oscillations also provide inhibitory connections to neural circuits that perform lower-level processes. Deficit in the performance of these oscillations has been examined as a marker for Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Additionally, the neurodegenerative processes associated with AD, such as the deposition of amyloid-beta plaques, do not occur in a spatially homogeneous fashion and progress more prominently in the medial temporal lobe in the early stages of the disease. This region of the brain... 

As the most widespread form of mental disorders, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remains among the main challenges in neurology and in the field of neuroscience. There are still no effective drugs to cure this disease or slow its progress, and prevention methods are still not even close to having established records. However, the onset of AD has been linked to certain dysfunctions of the oscillatory frequencies of the affected brain mainly in the gamma band. Hence, an approach to consider for reversing the damaging effects of AD could involve reviving such oscillations through stimulating the neuronal networks in the brain that are known to be the source of these oscillations. A recent research has... 

In season 1, we introduce a mathematical model of the in vivo progression of Alzheimer’s disease with focus on the role of prions in memory impairment. Our model consists of differential equations that describe the dynamic formation of Aβ -amyloid plaques based on the concentrations of Aβ oligomers, PrPC proteins, and the Aβ-×-PrPC complex, which are hypothesized to be responsible for synaptic tox- icity. We prove the well posedness of the model and provided stability results for its unique equilibrium, when the polymerization rate of β-amyloid is constant and also when it is described by a power law. In seson 2, We consider the existence and uniqueness of solutions of an initial-boundary... 

Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia, which has been recognized as the seventh most common fatal disease in the elderly over 65 years of age. Despite all the research done to recognize and treat this disease, so far there is no cure for this disease, and even most of the chemical treatments that are prescribed for Alzheimer's patients are only effective towards reducing the symptoms of this disease and lose their effectiveness as it progresses. Therefore, in the last two decades, in order to find a way to better understand and even treat AD, scientists have reached a concept called brain frequency stimulation, which can improve people's cognitive performance without the... 

One of the diseases of the central nervous system that are included in the neurodegenerative disorders and its impressive expansion among the people of the world and Iran is an alarming to us, is Alzheimer's disease. Since the cause of the disease has not yet been precisely determined, there is no definite cure for this disease yet. However, an important indicator in the disease is its early diagnosis so that the disease can be controlled and prevented from progressing in the early stages and before the degeneration of neurons. The big challenge that is observed in the diagnosis and effectiveness of drugs in this disease and any type of central nervous system disorder is the existence of the... 

In recent years, adversarial attacks have become a severe challenge in the field of security and stability of neural networks. These attacks in the field of medical images are able to cause misdiagnosis of the network, while hostile samples are considered normal from the perspective of a human observer. There are different ways to deal with these attacks. These methods mainly require full access to the neural network and knowledge of the type of hostile attack, as a result, the performance of these defense methods against unknown attacks drops drastically. In this research, we aim to find a method for identifying adversarial samples without knowing the architecture of the target neural...