Autopsy Brain Imaging

description

The Autopsy Brain Imaging Project is a collaboration between a group of neurologists, neuropathologists, MRI scientists and image analysis researchers. The aim of the collaboration is to collect a database of postmortem MRI scans and histological images of the brain in patients with neurodegenerative diseases (in particular AD and FTD) as well as in the general population. This fascinating project will generate data of great importance to neurodegenerative disease research, making it possible to connect changes that occur in the brain at a molecular level to macroscopic anatomical changes that can be detected using in vivo MRI.

specific aims

• To build a statistical model of the relationship between macroscopic structural changes in the hippocampus (size, shape, thickness and MRI contrast) and the presence and density of molecular precursors of neuron death in dementia.
• To develop computational methods that would allow 2D histological sections to be mapped into the corresponding locations in the 3D MRI volume.
• To build a detailed statistical atlas of the hippocampus and its subregions (e.g., dentate gyrus, cornu ammonis fields 1-4) that could be used to estimate the locations of these substructures in in vivo MRI data.
• To generate high-resolution anatomical and diffusion tensor MRI data that would serve as a validation platform for various segmentation and registration methods developed by PICSL and our collaborators.