Automated brain parcellation and morphometry

描述(由申请人提供)： 神经退行性疾病、精神疾病和健康衰老都经常与大脑的结构变化有关。这些变化会导致脑组织成像特性的变化，以及脑的形态测量特性的变化，例如体积、折叠和表面积。目前的分析技术需要熟练的操作员进行广泛的人工干预，此外，他们对用于获得数据的脉冲序列和扫描仪高度敏感本项目的最终目标是开发一套用于详尽标记大脑体积(皮质和皮质下)的自动化工具，以确定与阿尔茨海默病等神经退行性疾病相关的特定疾病的变化。这些程序基于脑组织的内在属性，因此它们将在MRI数据集上可靠地发挥作用，而无论最初获得它们的脉冲序列或扫描仪制造商是什么。 拟议的软件旨在大幅改进目前的脑形态自动量化方法。这些分割过程将作为一种新的图像处理服务商业化，用于临床药物试验和大型多中心研究，利用健壮、可扩展、快速和高度自动化的集成软件流水线。此外，这项技术将以插件软件的形式实现，可以嵌入MRI扫描仪的操作系统中，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.