CRII: SCH: Analysis of Population-Based Image Metamorphosis

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Uncovering brain development and disease progression can ultimately advance our understanding of brain disorders, such as mental illnesses and brain cancer. However, the analysis of early brain growth and pathological anatomy changes in brain scans needs image metamorphosis that can jointly capture structural changes occurring in a developing brain and appearance changes introduced by brain myelination and tumor growth. This project aims to develop statistical and computational models to summarize these metamorphic changes from image pairs, to sequences, and to populations. By enriching our knowledge of the healthy brain, psychopathologies, and brain pathologies, this research has the potential to provide clues in devising treatment strategies for brain disorders.The focus of this project is the development of population-based image metamorphosis that accounts for brain structure and image appearance changes simultaneously. The essential component of the developed model is an advanced image-to-image metamorphosis that allows establishing brain mappings between image pairs. This project develops a novel metamorphic regression model to handle image sequences and estimate age-related brain changes in image time-series. The population analysis component leverages the regression model and statistical tools for classification and assessment of typical and atypical brain changes. The primary applications of the developed image metamorphosis models are studies of early brain development and brain tumor growth. The resulting models could be applied to understand the etiology of developmental disorders and psychiatric conditions, such as autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disease. They could also monitor brain tumor growth through predicting tumor evolution and classifying tumor type and grade.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.