Automated brain parcellation and morphometry

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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.