A service for precise brain anatomy quantitation in MRI

R43 MH60507

Worth, Andrew J., Ph.D.
Chief Technological Officer

Quantitative measurements 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 MR brain images 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. This service will be useful to an emerging market of Neuroscientists, drug companies, and eventually clinicians. As part of a long-range plan for this service involving multiple types of services and products, an initial prototype system will be created by porting research software and methods. This prototype will be augmented and then evaluated by using a standard suite of test data and, as a complete example application, evaluated by comparing its results to measurements made of the hippocampus in 30 brain scans using the research software. We will rewrite the research software for an inexpensive hardware platform and provide open source access to the basic software tool on an inexpensive hardware platform. The prototype will be considered feasible if the cost of service of the evaluation is low enough to be born by the potential market.