A SERVICE FOR PRECISE BRAIN ANATOMY QUANTITATION IN MRI

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Quantitative measurement, of the structure of the human brain in vivo have been found to be useful in the understanding of brain development, diseases, and injury but this type of analysis is difficult and time consuming to perform. A service is proposed that can efficiently provide quantitative macroscopic neuromorphometric analyses of MRI brain scans that will expand understanding of normal in vivo brain structure, document diagnoses and response to treatment, and allow the discovery and application of new treatments for brain disorders that appear as macroscopic structural changes. In Phase I we created and demonstrated the feasibility of a neuromorphometric analysis software platform (NASP) consisting of operating procedures and computer programs that makes brain measurement methods accessible at the clinical level. The main software application, "NVM" includes "SegMentor," a feature for tightly coupling measurement methods with the measurement tool. In Phase II, an existing automatic segmentation technique will be incorporated into the rest of the system. The entire system will be validated by applying it to real-world data and will be used to develop comprehensively documented neuroanatomical measurement techniques. The result of these efforts can be applied to clinical diagnosis and measuring the response to treatment in pharmaceutical trials.