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Characterization of brain plasticity in schizophrenia using template deformation
Abraham Dubb1, Zhiyong Xie, Ruben Gur
1Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. adubb@grasp.cis.upenn.edu
Rationale And Objective:
Abnormal neurodevelopment may play a role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. We used deformation-based morphometry to examine voxel-wise age-related changes in patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy brains.
Materials And Methods:
We used a set of skull-stripped brains from an image database of cranial magnetic resonance images. We then deformed a template brain to the rest of the brains creating a set of deformation fields. Using the Jacobian values of these deformation fields, we calculated the voxel-wise t-score for comparison of controls with patients. We also calculated the voxel-wise Pearson correlation of Jacobian with age for both controls and patients.
Results:
By examining the volume renderings of these statistical fields, we found that healthy people undergo age-related expansion of the ventricles, the surrounding periventricular white matter, and a corresponding decline in the frontal lobes and cingulate gyrus. In contrast, patients show much less of this age-related expansion of the ventricles and less atrophy in the cerebral cortex. In addition, patients have larger ventricles and reduced volume in the frontal/parietal lobes.
Conclusion:
These constellations of findings suggest that otherwise normal age-related ventricular enlargement and cortical loss occurs in schizophrenia patients, albeit at an earlier age.