PURPOSE Cigarette smoking has been associated with increased occurrence of multiple sclerosis (MS), as well as clinical disability and disease progression in MS. We aimed to assess the effects of smoking on the white matter (WM) in patients with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS) using diffusion tensor imaging. METHODS Smoker patients with CIS (n=16), smoker healthy controls (n=13), nonsmoker...

CHANGES IN CEREBRAL WHITE MATTER, VASCULAR RISK ANDCOGNITION ACROSS THE ADULT LIFESPANbyANDREW R. BENDERMay 2014Advisor: Dr. Naftali RazMajor: Psychology (Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience)Degree: Doctor of PhilosophyNumerous studies over the past decade have used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) toexamine the associations between age, diffusion and ani...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia is associated with diverse white matter (WM) brain abnormalities. In this study, we sought to examine the WM microstructural findings which underlie clinical psychopathology clusters in schizophrenia and hypothesized that these symptom clusters are associated with common and unique WM tracts. METHODS Overall, 76 healthy controls (HC), and 148 patients with schizophren...

The primary aim of this study was to investigate to what degree the age-related white matter development, here called "brain age", is associated with working memory (WM) and numeric abilities in 6-year-old children. We measured white matter development using diffusion tensor imaging to calculate fractional anisotropy (FA). A "brain age" model was created using multivariate statistics, which des...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and white matter tractography (WMT) are promising techniques for estimating the course, extent, and connectivity patterns of the white matter (WM) structures in the human brain. In this study, DTI and WMT were used to evaluate WM tract reorganization after the surgical resection of brain tumors and vascular malformations. METHODS Pre- and ...

Introduction. Performance of nonuniformity correction approaches is usually evaluated indirectly, on the basis of remaining tissue intensity variability rather than the actual estimated bias field. Common indirect measures include coefficient of variation of white matter CV(WM) and gray matter CV(GM), and coefficient of joint variation CJV between WM and GM [1]. However, disagreements between i...

Introduction: Multiple sclerosis affects both white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM). Conventional MR imaging is widely used to assess T2 hyperintense lesions in WM. These techniques are suboptimal in detecting cortical lesions. Recently, double inversion recovery (DIR) and phase sensitive inversion recovery (PSIR) have been shown to increase the confidence with which cortical lesions can be vi...

Automated segmentation of white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) is a very important task for detecting multiple diseases. The paper proposed a simple method for WM and GM extraction form magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain. The proposed methods based on binarization, wavelet decomposition, and convexhull produce very effective results in the context of visual inspection and as well as qu...

BACKGROUND Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is most commonly associated with TAR-DNA binding protein (TDP-43) or tau pathology at autopsy, but there are no in vivo biomarkers reliably discriminating between sporadic cases. As disease-modifying treatments emerge, it is critical to accurately identify underlying pathology in living patients so that they can be entered into appropriate eti...

Introduction In recent years, data-driven analysis of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has been extended beyond white matter (WM), explicitly modelling partial voluming with adjacent tissues. Supervised methods such as singleand multi-tissue constrained spherical deconvolution (CSD) reconstruct orientation distribution functions (ODF) of WM, grey matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), give...