Volumetric MRI analysis of thalamic stroke patients

Abstract

The thalamic pain syndrome is a weakly deduced phenomenon that develops as a complication of a small stroke in the thalamus. Because this is syndrome result in many diffrent physiological disturbances, it is critical to understand it’s physiological basis to diagnose and to treat it. It is important to determine the whole volume of the lesion and to label it with reference to an anatomical atlas in order to identify the stroke region more accurately. In this thesis we develop a software tool to help the neuroradiologists interpret the stroke region more accurately by estimating its volume and identifying its anatomical label. To reduce the anatomical variability, the first step consist of spatial registration and normalization of brain images. This is achieved using the procedure implemented in the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) package in Matlab. Normalized MR images are used to identify the lesions in the brain, to calculate its volume and to label it in a graphical user environment. Three types of neuropsychological test i.e. are Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Frontal Behavioral Inventory (FBI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) are evaluated in estimating their correlations with the total volume of selected regions. Neuroradiologists can potentially benefit from the software to diagnose and to treat the thalamic stroke patients. Furtermore, such a platform may help the clinicans to interact with each other distantly by exchanging more objective information about the clinical neuroanatomical assessment of their patients. Additionally, correlation analysis of neuropsychological tests and stroke volume in the Talairach atlas plays a role for the neuropsychological and neuroanatomical data fusion for a better assessment.|Keywords : Thalamic syndrome, registration, normalization, structural MRI, Talairach atlas, Neuropsychologic tests, MMSE, FBI, BDI.