Magnetic Resonance Diffusion Tensor Imaging Data Processing And Its Clinical Application

At present, diffusion tensor imaging is the only way to measure water molecule's diffusion in-vivo without invasion. This powerful imaging technique could reflect the diffusion information of water molecule; thereby help to understand the human body's organic aging and pathological changes. As one of the most efficient methods, it could provide more information for diagnosis, surgery and therapy. For the moment, it has attracted scientists'attention and has been used in many correlative research areas. There are two principal methods in diffusion tensor image analysis:region-of-interest analysis and whole-brain, voxel-based analysis. The majority of studies, to date, have adopted the former one, manually defining region-of-interest on the raw images, which allows a powerful examination of the selected regions on the basis of prior information. However, the unavoidable subjective of region-of-interests'define, the unambiguous criteria of region-of-interests'depict methods and the deficiency of the reliability all devaluate the method of region-of-interesting. At the contrary, the voxel-based analysis could be more helpful in discovering unanticipated or unpredicted areas of neuro-anatomical deficits. In this paper, an optimized voxel-based analysis was introduced into diffusion tensor imaging data processing, which might extract more information from the diffusion tensor imaging data. Comparing to region-of-interesting methods, it doesn't need prior information, as the symptom and so on. Furthermore, it outweighs the traditional voxel-based analysis method at lower operational complexity, less memory consumption, and smaller calculation time.In this paper, the optimized voxel-based analysis was introduced to depict the brain white matter abnormalities of first-episode schizophrenia, refractory partial epilepsy and refractory depression, respectively. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to find out the brain anatomic difference between refractory depression patients and the normal controls. And significant differences have been found, which provided new imaging evidence for further investigation of these neuro-psychiatry diseases. In sum, voxel-based analysis has been proved to be an important and effective data-driven method for diffusion tensor imaging data analysis, and is suitable for clinical investigation of the brain white matter deficits of all neuro-psychiatry diseases.