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Stability Analysis of Voxel-based Cortical Thickness Measurement of Human Brain

The cerebral cortex is gray matter tissue which covers cerebral hemispheres. In recent years, many studies reported that abnormal cortical thickness was found in several diseases of central neural system, such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's diseases, and schizophrenia. Therefore, the whole-brain measurement of cortical thickness using the non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging becomes important. However, not many algorithms were reported in the past due to the extremely complex folding structure of human cortex. In this thesis, a voxel-based cortical thickness method proposed by Hutton et al was implemented using MATLAB to achieve automated measurement. Several crucial factors, including the definition of boundary condition, interpolation method, the step size of developing each streamline, and spatial resolution of imaging space, in the implementation were discussed.
In addition, the analysis of stability, or precision, of our self-developed program was evaluated . Sixteen experiments of reproducibility were performed in two months on the same 24-year-old healthy volunteer repeatedly to obtain whole-brain 3D T1WI. Cortical thickness map was calculated independently and normalized to the same coordination. Mean, standard deviation, and normalized standard deviation of 16 measurements were calculated on every cortical voxel, along with whole-brain mean cortical thickness. Various sizes of 3D smoothing kernel were applied, and the results showed stronger smoothing might help higher precision by the cost of spatial resolution.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0904112-193034
Date04 September 2012
CreatorsChung, Run-Hong
ContributorsMing-Ting Wu, Tzu-Chao Chuang, Wen-Chau Wu, Hsiao-Wen Chung, Teng-Yi Huang
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageCholon
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0904112-193034
Rightsunrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive

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