MUTUAL INFORMATION BASED IMAGE PROCESSING FOR FMRI

本项目的主要目的是进一步开发和评估一种在功能磁共振图像（fMRI）中检测激活的新方法。描述了检测激活的标准方法，以及检测结果对神经外科计划的临床意义。新方法是基于两种波形之间的相互信息的公式-体素的fMRI时间响应和实验协议时间轴。在该方法中，基于互信息对所有体素生成分数，然后用于计算实验的激活图。互信息用于功能磁共振成像分析，因为它已被证明是稳健的量化任何两个波形之间的关系。我们的技术采用了一种原则性的方法，通过对协议时间线和体素的时间响应之间的关系做出一些假设，来计算大脑激活图。这在功能磁共振成像实验中可能很重要，因为人们对这两种波形之间的关系知之甚少。初步实验证明了这种计算大脑激活图的方法，并与其他更传统的分析技术进行了比较。描述了从正在进行的项目中获取代表性数据集的计划，并将它们用于新方法和标准方法的比较。

This project aims primarily to further develop and evaluate a novel method for the detection of activation in functional Magnetic Resonance Images (fMRI). Standard approaches to the detection of activation are described, as well as the clinical significance of detection results for neurosurgical planning. The new method is based on a formulation of the mutual information between two waveforms--the fMRI temporal response of a voxel and the experimental protocol timeline. In this method, scores based on mutual information are generated for all voxels and then used to compute the activation map of an experiment. Mutual information for fMRI analysis is employed because it has been shown to be robust in quantifying the relationship between any two waveforms. Our technique takes a principled approach toward calculating the brain activation map by making few assumptions about the relationship between the protocol timeline and the temporal response of a voxel. This may be significant in fMRI experiments where little is known about the relationship between these two waveforms. Preliminary experiments are presented to demonstrate this approach of computing the brain activation map, and a comparison to other more traditional analysis techniques is presented. A plan is described to obtain representative data sets from ongoing projects and to use them for a comparison of the new method and a standard method.