Brain Functional Magnetic Resonance Data Processing Research And Applications

Brains are the most complex machine in the nature, and the functionalities of brains are the most complicated forms of motion in the natural world. Therefore, the study of the brains has its scientific as well as philosophic significance. Revealing how the brains work is a big challenge for natural scientists nowadays. Since the early nineteen nineties, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) technique, developed from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique, has become an important progress in the field of brain study. Based on Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) effect theory, for different parts of brains under different conditions, fMRI technique observes the physiological changes related to nerve system activities. MRI technique can offer orientationally detects the changes of blood oxygenation level inside capillary vessels in pallium, and these changes are directly related to excitated brain activities. Orientational brain functionality study is one of the important applications of fMRI in the brain study field. The goal of Orientational brain functionality study is to, in the image of functionalities, mark the activating brain areas caused by excitation. Then the marked brain area image is overlapped with T1 structural graph of the same level so that to form the orientational brain functionality graph.In this paper, we mainly investigate processing mechanism of brain for visual information. Experiment project is visual chessboard experiment with multi- subjects under the same conditions to obtain brain functionality image by adopting block stimulate pattern. The resulting orientation of functionalities is obtained after analyzing and comparing these experimental data. The whole procedure using these experimental data includes space pre-treatment, modeling, parameter estimation, and data analysis. The pre-treatment, including realignment,registration,slice timing,normalization,smoothing, is decided according to the feature of experimental data in order to obtain optimized results. Modeling and parameter estimation are decided according to the activating mode. Data analysis is used by combining with t-examination and F-examination. The activating areas of the final result are mainly occipital area, further, the processing mechanism of brain for visual information is verified. Those results provide us some theoretical foundations in understanding the brain organization, in the study of the brain functionalities, and in the clinical diagnosis and application.Two analyzing methods of fMRI data are introduced: data-driven analysis method and model-driven analysis method. It is mainly to focus on a typical model-driven analysis method - Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM).