Development of system and software for precise brain functional mapping

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Recently, high-order brain functions have been studied using nuclear medicine imaging and/or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To perform these studies, it is necessary to precisely register the brain functional images obtained by nuclear medicine imaging or fMRI to the morphological images obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this research project, we developed a system and software with which the registration between the two images can be performed precisely. In 1997, we developed a basic system and software using the purchased workstation and C-compiler. In the software developed in this project, we used the stochastic sign change (SSC) criterion and nonlinear least-squares method for maximizing the similarity between the two images. In 1998, we investigated the availability of our software comparing it with the software generally used, and we found that our software was superior to the conventional one in accuracy. In 1999, we applied our system and software to the clinical data and found that they were useful and applicable in clinical settings. We also applied our software to other areas such as the measurement of cerebral blood flow using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and we found that our software can also be used in other areas.