NEUROMORPHOMETRY IN SCHIZOPHRENIA BY COMPUTER ALGORITHM, ALZ BY BRAIN MAPPING

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. The Resource Grant facilitates two grants directed by John G. Csernansky, M.D. These grants both depend upon methods of cortical analysis to be developed in TRD4 to complement high dimensional mappings of deep gray matter brain structures and cortical surfaces of the human brain. These grants involve the elucidation of brain structure abnormalities in the hippocampus of patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, specifically schizophrenia and dementia of the Alzheimer type. In both cases, hippocampal structure abnormalities likely to be present in such persons are subtle and difficult to detect using conventional methods for manual estimations of brain structure volumes. Current computational anatomy methods for estimating brain structure volumes (Haller, et al, 1997) and for group comparisons using metrics of hippocampus structure shape have been developed. These metrics appear to be superior to gross volumetry in discriminating patients with neuropsychiatric disea se from he althy controls (Csernansky et al, 1998, 2000). As outlined below in the relationship, the methods developed in TRD4 will be important in analyzing neuromorphometric changes in brain structures such as the cingulate gyrus. For example, sulcal matching and generation algorithms developed in Aim 3 of TRD4 will be used to analyze subtle changes in sulcal features of cortical surfaces of cingulate gyrus that are generated by the algorithm developed in Aim 1 of TRD4. Progress: 10 Cingulate gyri have been segmented and annotated, both by hand and automatically. Validations have been carried out demonstrated the validatity of Bayes segmentation. Surface reconstructions are being examined for their accuracy relative to hand contouring.