Measurement Of Cortical Thickness On Rat Brain Based On MR Images

The cerebral cortex is the outermost layered structure of neural tissue of thecerebrum, in humans and other mammals. The cerebral plays a key role in adjustingfunction, it is the material basis of human consciousness. Cortical thickness is animportant morphological indexes in the cerebral cortex. It may change significantly inthe corresponding area with development and aging of the brain, as well aspathological process. Clinically, the assessment of cortical thickness is widely used tostudy the determination of pathology and processes of brain maturation and ageing.Nowadays, with the development of magnetic resonance imaging technology,thickness measurement and analysis based on MR images has become the importantbasic work in brain research.Animal experiment plays a very important role in the study of brain science.The rats have strong ability to reproduce, short experiment cycle, low-cost to be madeinto brain disease model and genes similar to human, so they have been widely usedby lots of laboratories in brain research. However, there is no well-understoodmethods to measure rat cortex thickness.In our study, we present an automated method to measure and analyze rat braincortical thickness which combines segmentation of MR image, Laplace method andvoxel based analysis. The main works are as follows:(1) We extract the cerebral cortex with the atlas reverse registration method,then we can measure the cortical thickness in the original space, which can preservethe individual difference and improve the accuracy of measurement.(2) We measure the cortical thickness with Laplace method. In the special caseof the third boundary, we present Euler-PDE method to improve the accuracy andspeed.(3) We take the voxel based method of SPM to solve the problem of anatomicallocation corresponding between different individuals and present the method of voxel based cortical thickness (VBCT) analysis. We also assess the whole procedurewhich is used to measure and analyze cortical thickness with MR images of rats.This work establish a system to measure and analyze cortical thickness on ratbrain based on MR images, which can provide convenient and effective means ofdata processing for rat brain experiments. Further, it promote the brain research.