The Establish Of Voxel Based Morphometry Of Magnetic Resonance T2-weighted Images And Its Application In Alzheimer’s Disease

Medical imaging techniques such as CT(Computed Tomography), MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging, PET(Position Emission Tomography) allow the researchers to noninvasively observe the brain structure and function in the normal physiological state and have been widely used in the basic research, the clinical diagnosis and the therapeutic evaluation of the diseases. And MRI has got wide attention and application because it is zero radioactivity, noninvasive, and has good soft tissue contrast, high spatial resolution, a variety of modal image and so on.Especially the structural MRI of the human brain has become one of the most widely used auxiliary clinical diagnostic imaging technology because of its advantages of stability and high soft tissue contrast. At present the commonly used MRI brain structure images in clinic are mainly T1-weighted images, T2-weighted images,Proton Density weighted images, et al.The data analysis plays a significant role in the study of medical images. In recent years, the analysis methods of the structural MRI images have been also developed from visual qualitative analysis to quantitative analysis based on ROI(Region of Interest) and the objective, automatic VBA(Voxel-Based Analysis) widely used in recent years. VBM(Voxel Based Morphometry) is one of the most widely used statistical analysis platform of MRI T1-weighted images of the human brain.MRI T2-weighted images of the human brain are important component of the structural MRI. Compared with brain MRI T1-weighted images, though T2-weighted images have slightly lower tissue contrast, brain MRI T2-weighted images in clinical mainly reflect tissue physiological changes about diseases. The sensitivity to detect lesion areas is much higher than the T1-weighted images. So MRI T2-weighted images are more advantageous to diagnose the brain lesions. The clinical experts often use the brain MRI T2 weighted images to diagnosis brain lesions. So it is important for the clinical diagnosis, curative effect evaluation and basic research to establish the T2-VBM analysis method. However, there are large differences in the imaging principle, the image tissue contrast between T2-weighted image andT1-weighted image. So the current VBM analysis platform which is only applicable to brain MRI T1-weighted images can’t be used in the statistical analysis of brain MRI T2-weighted images. Therefore, the establishment of the brain MRI T2-VBM analysis method is the urgent problem to be solved.This paper completed the VBM analysis of the brain MRI T2-weighted images and established the T2-VBM analysis method. And then we used the T2-VBM method to analyze the established two group of T2-weighted simulated data which respectively have increased grey value in the lesion regions and decreased grey value in the lesion regions; at the same time we used the traditional VBM method to analyze two group of corresponding T1-weighted simulated data. Finally we used the evaluation method that reflected the sensitivity to detect the lesion areas to compare the results of two methods. And the good results proved that detecting lesion areas of the T2-VBM method is reliable and stable. Then the T2-VBM method was applied to the disease model of Alzheimer’s Disease. We used the method to process the scanned brain MRI T2-weighed images, compared the results with the existing research results and got the consistency of these results. The process can provide the more reliable reference for the later study. On the other hand the consistency also verified the practicability of the brain MRI T2-VBM method.