Subtle but progressive variations in human cortical thickness have been associated with the initial phases of prevalent neurological and psychiatric conditions. But slight changes in cortical thickness at preclinical stages are typically masked by effects of the Gaussian kernel smoothing on the cortical surface shape descriptors. Here we present the first study aimed at detecting changes in hum...

BACKGROUND: Structural deficiencies within the prefrontal cortex might be related to drug-taking behavior that prevails in smokers. Cortical thickness has been found to be a structural modulator of cerebral function and cognition and a subtle correlate of mental disorders. However, to date an analysis of cortical thickness in smokers compared with never-smokers has not been undertaken. METHODS:...

BACKGROUND Recent data suggests that in chronic pain there are changes in gray matter consistent with decreased brain volume, indicating that the disease process may produce morphological changes in the brains of those affected. However, no study has evaluated cortical thickness in relation to specific functional changes in evoked pain. In this study we sought to investigate structural (gray ma...

BACKGROUND Although schizophrenia has been associated with abnormalities in brain anatomy, imaging studies have not fully determined the nature and relative contributions of gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) disturbances underlying these findings. We sought to determine the pattern and distribution of these GM and WM abnormalities. Furthermore, we aimed to clarify the contribution of abnor...

The local structure of the proximal femoral cortex is of interest since both fracture risk, and the effects of various interventions aimed at reducing that risk, are associated with cortical properties focused in particular regions rather than dispersed over the whole bone. Much of the femoral cortex is less than 3mm thick, appearing so blurred in clinical CT that its actual density is not appa...

Several algorithms for measuring the cortical thickness in the human brain from MR image volumes have been described in the literature, the majority of which rely on fitting deformable models to the inner and outer cortical surfaces. However, the constraints applied during the model fitting process in order to enforce spherical topology and to fit the outer cortical surface in narrow sulci, whe...