The Development of NTU Chinese Standard Brain Template: Morphologic Comparison and Application in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Chang, Chun-Yuan
Abstract
Human brain function has been regarded as a mystery for a long time, which is not only due to the diversity of brain structures but also due to the variability of neurocognitive functions among gender, age and ethics. To minimize inter-subject discrepancies, most data analyses were developed based on the standard brain template in the field of neuroimaging research.To figure out the relationship between brain function and structure Talairach set a three-dimensional coordinate system , cooperating with the postmortem brain autopsy , and thus a standard brain atlas, the Talairach atlas, was created. Thereafter, Montreal Neurologic Institute (MNI) collected brain images from more than three hundred subjects’ brain MRI image. MNI adopted image processing methods such as realignment and transformation to create a population-based standard brain template by averaging three hundreds brain dataset.MNI template is worldwide adopted nowadays However the difference of brain structures between western and eastern people was observed because of the diversity of environmental and genetic factors. The mismatch issue may lead to bias or inappropriate interpretation in neurocognitive studies. In this thesis, we recruited ninety-five subjects and developed the Chinese brain template (NTU CBT) based on the process of MNI template. As yet, this is the first Chinese brain template that recruited a large population. We observed that the brain shape of NTU CBT is flatter and more circular than that of MNI template by morphometric analysis. The brain size in MNI template is larger than that of NTU CBT by more than 25%. The most significant differences come from height of superior brain and length of posterior brain. In Chinese subgroup analysis, the brain size in men is bigger than in women, especially in brain width. In addition, we found more precise localization more of activation voxels in motor and visual fMRI experiments while incorporating the NTU CBT into data analyses.The thesis showed not only morphologic diversity between MNI and Chinese templates but also showed that there would be more accurate interpretation in neurocognitive functional studies using the developed NTU CBT. In the future, we will work on higher resolution template and complete functional cortical labeling, which may benefit in neuroscience study, human brain mapping and clinical applications.
Subjects
Chinese Brain Template
MNI template
atlas
Morphometric analysis
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
Type
thesis
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