Automated brain parcellation and morphometry

描述（由申请人提供）： 神经退行性疾病、精神疾病和健康老龄化都经常与脑中的结构变化相关。这些变化可导致脑组织的成像特性的改变，以及脑的形态测量特性的改变，例如体积、折叠和表面积。目前的分析技术需要熟练操作者的大量人工干预，本项目的最终目标是开发一套自动化工具，用于对大脑体积进行详尽的标记。（皮层和皮层下）以鉴定与神经变性疾病如阿尔茨海默病相关的疾病特异性变化。这些方法基于脑组织的内在性质，因此，它们将在MRI数据集上可靠地起作用，而不管脉冲序列或最初获得它们的扫描仪的制造商。 所提出的软件被设计为导致对用于脑形态的自动量化的当前方法的实质性改进。这些分割程序将被商业化为用于临床药物试验和大型多中心研究的新型图像处理服务，其利用集成的软件管道，该软件管道是鲁棒的、可扩展的、此外，该技术将作为插件软件实施，该插件软件可以嵌入MRI扫描仪的操作系统中，以向临床用户提供这些量化技术。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Neurodegenerative disorders, psychiatric disorders, and healthy aging are all are frequently associated with structural changes in the brain These changes can cause alterations in the imaging properties of brain tissue, as well as changes in morphometric properties of the brain, such as volume, folding and surface area Current analysis techniques require extensive manual intervention by a skilled operator, and in addition are highly sensitive to the pulse sequence and scanner that is used to obtain the data The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a set of automated tools for exhaustive labeling of the cerebral volume (cortical and sub cortical) to identify disease-specific changes related to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease These procedures are based on intrinsic properties of brain tissue, therefore they will function reliably on MRI datasets regardless of the pulse sequence or manufacturer of the scanner from which they were originally obtained. The proposed software is designed to lead to substantial improvement over current methods for automated quantification of brain morphology These segmentation procedures will be commercialized as a novel image processing service for clinical drug trials and large multi-center research studies utilizing an integrated software pipeline that is robust, scalable, rapid and highly automatic Additionally this technology will be implemented as plug-in software that may be embedded within a MRI scanner's operating system to provide these quantification technologies to clinical users.