Surface-based Morphometry In Male Juvenile Violent Offenders

Brain is the most complex organ of the human body. It is involved in feeling, motor, learning, memory, language, emotion and other higher cognitive functions. Since the rapid development of brain imaging, in particular, magnetic resonance brain imaging technology, various morphometric approaches have been developed to identify macroscopic changes in the human brain. Based on these techniques, we can detect changes in brain structures due to development, aging and lesion. Cerebral cortex is a highly complex structure with multiple folds. Abnormal pattern of cortical folding is associated with the occurrence of many diseases of the brain. Therefore, analyzing the cortical folding changes of various disease may provide a deeper understanding of the pathogenesis of these disease.In recent years, juvenile crime is common in our country, and has a rising trend year by year, in which youth violence crime is a major problem in juvenile crime, much attention should be paid to this issue. In the violent juvenile offenders, some of existing morphometric studies were performed by using voxel-based morphometry(VBM). However, VBM provides a mixed measure of cortical gray matter including cortical thickness, cortical surface area and/or cortical folding. The interpretation of VBM results can be difficult given that an actual physical characteristic is not measured directly.The present study attempts to clarify the relative importance of various morphometry parameters for the brain pathology underlying male juvenile offenders including cortical volume, cortical area, and cortical thickness. Specifically, the cortical maps of these indices were compared between violent offenders and controls with a surface-based general linear model(GLM) to map group contrasts on a vertex-by-vertex basis. Hence, separating the analyses of these independent factors may help provide more reliably insight into neural underpinnings of violent behavior. We used Freesurfer to detect the difference of cortical volume between normal control and male juvenile violent offenders, and calculate the cortical thickness and surface area. Based on existing data characterizing structural and functional abnormalities in violent offenders, we hypothesized that when compared with controls, male juvenile violent offenders would exhibit:(1) cortical thickness reduction in the left supramarginal gyrus;(2) Cortical area contraction in the right inferior parietal cortex and lateral occipital cortex;(3) Cortical volume reduction in multiple brain regions including the middle frontal cortex, superior parietal cortex, lateral occipital cortex and cuneus. It can reveal the causes of violence based on the functions of these cortical regions.