Novel DT-MRI Analyses of White Matter in Schizophrenia

描述(申请人提供)：这是一份R01基金的申请书，题为“精神分裂症患者脑白质的新颖DT-MRI分析”。这项为期五年的奖项的目标是应用新的方法，使用扩散张量磁共振成像(DT-MRI)和DT-MRI后处理技术评估精神分裂症患者的脑白质异常。这项工作建立在我们之前的工作基础上，表明白质束可以用DT-MRI检测和描绘。这些工具将被进一步开发，然后应用于DT-MRI数据，以评估精神分裂症患者的白质纤维束异常(即钩状束、穹隆体束和扣带束)。该项目的具体目标是：(1)开发和应用新的空间归一化和配准方法；(2)开发和应用基于随机建模的新型3D DT-MRI纤维束成像方法；(3)开发和应用自动化工具，将成像结果分组为具有解剖学意义的白质束和感兴趣区；以及(4)通过新的白质扩散定量测量来评估患者群体的纤维束完整性，并比较它们在上述排列的感兴趣区中的平均值。虽然这笔赠款的临床重点是精神分裂症，但这项技术将直接适用于使用DTI数据的其他领域，例如早期发现发育中的婴儿大脑中的白质损伤，探索和表征多发性硬化症病变造成的白质破坏，以及在神经外科手术过程中显示重要的白质束。更重要的是，我们计划通过在开源平台上实现这些工具，使其他研究人员可以使用这些工具。我们认为，后一个目标对于向更大的神经科学界传播分析DT-MRI数据的新技术尤为重要。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is an application for an R01 grant entitled, "Novel DT-MRI Analyses of White Matter in Schizophrenia". The goal of this five-year award is to apply new approaches for evaluating white matter abnormalities in schizophrenia using Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI) and DT-MRI post-processing techniques. This work builds upon our previous work showing that white matter tracts can be detected and delineated with DT-MRI. These tools will be further developed and then applied to DT-MRI data in order to evaluate white matter fiber tract abnormalities in schizophrenia (i.e., uncinate fasciculus, corpus callosum and cingulum bundle). The specific aims of this project are: (1) to developed and apply novel spatial normalization and registration methods; (2) to develop and apply a novel 3D DT-MRI tractography method based on stochastic modeling, (3) to develop and apply automated tools for grouping tractography results into anatomically meaningful white matter bundles and ROIs, and (4) to evaluate fiber tract integrity in a patient population by a lying new quantitative measures of diffusion in white matter, and comparing their mean values in the aforementioned arcellated ROIs. Although the clinical focus of this grant is on schizophrenia, this technology will be directly applicable to other fields using data from DTI, such as for the early detection of white matter damage in the developing infant brain, exploration and characterization of white matter disruptions caused by MS lesions, and visualization of important white matter tracts during neurosurgical procedures. Of further importance, we plan to make these tools available to other researchers by implementing them in an open-source platform. We believe that these latter goals are particularly important for disseminating novel techniques for analyzing DT-MRI data to the larger neuroscience community.