[MODERN APPROACHES TO THE TREATMENT OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS (REVIEW AND CLINICAL CASE)]

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic dysimmune neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system, that affects people of working age and inevitably leads to disability. Treatment of the disease is one of the urgent problems of modern clinical neurology, which is explained by the variety of clinical variants of the flow, the lack of an effective method of treatment. This article is devoted to a review of modern approaches to the issues of etiology, pathogenesis and treatment of multiple sclerosis. Also, the classification of multiple sclerosis depending on the course of the disease, data on modern approaches to the treatment of multiple sclerosis, the criteria for the appointment of differentiated therapy depending on the course of the disease with the use of Disease-Modifying Drugs (DMDs) are given. The main strategies for the use of DMDs are described: escalation and de-escalation. The authors of the article presented a clinical case of observation and treatment of a patient with a remitting-relapsing type of multiple sclerosis with a rapid transformation to the secondary-progressive course. The analysis of the dynamics of clinical manifestations with the reflection of the degree of progression on the EDSS scale, analysis of the the radiological study data, as well as the analysis of the prescription of the drugs of the first-line and the second-line treatment to this patient during the observation period from 2010 to 2017 are given.

Toward a workbench for rodent brain image data systems architecture and design

We present a novel system for storing and manipulating microscopic images from sections through the brain and higher-level data extracted from such images. The system is designed and built on a three-tier paradigm and provides the research community with a web-based interface for facile use in neuroscience research. The Oracle relational database management system provides the ability to store a variety of objects relevant to the images and provides the framework for complex querying of data stored in the system. Further, the suite of applications intimately tied into the infrastructure in the application layer provide the user the ability not only to query and visualize the data, but also to perform analysis operations based on the tools embedded into the system. The presentation layer uses extant protocols of the modern web browser and this provides ease of use of the system. The present release, named Functional Anatomy of the Cerebro-Cerebellar System (FACCS), available through The Rodent Brain Workbench (http:// rbwb.org/), is targeted at the functional anatomy of the cerebro-cerebellar system in rats, and holds axonal tracing data from these projections. The system is extensible to other circuits and projections and to other categories of image data and provides a unique environment for analysis of rodent brain maps in the context of anatomical data. The FACCS application assumes standard animal brain atlas models and can be extended to future models. The system is available both for interactive use from a remote web-browser client as well as for download to a local server machine.

Database and tools for analysis of topographic organization and map transformations in major projection systems of the brain

Integration of dispersed and complicated information collected from the brain is needed to build new knowledge. But integration may be hampered by rigid presentation formats, diversity of data formats among laboratories, and lack of access to lower level data. We have addressed some of the fundamental issues related to this challenge at the level of anatomical data, by producing a coordinate based digital atlas and database application for a major projection system in the rat brain: the cerebro-ponto-cerebellar system. This application, Functional Anatomy of the Cerebro-Cerebellar System in rat (FACCS), is available via the Rodent Brain WorkBench (http://www.rbwb.org). The data included are x,y,z-coordinate lists describing exact distributions of tissue elements (axonal terminal fields of axons, or cell bodies) that are labeled with axonal tracing techniques. All data are translated to a common local coordinate system to facilitate across animal comparison. A search capability allows queries based on, e.g. location of tracer injection sites, tracer category, size of the injection sites, and contributing author. A graphic search tool allows the user to move a volume cursor inside a coordinate system to detect particular injection sites having connections to a specific tissue volume at chosen density levels. Tools for visualization and analysis of selected data are included, as well as an option to download individual data sets for further analysis. With this application, data and metadata from different experiments are mapped into the same information structure and made available for re-use and re-analysis in novel combinations. The application is prepared for future handling of data from other projection systems as well as other data categories.