| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊科學與工程研究所 === 94 === Brain template is essential to functional and structural brain mapping.
It provides a standard stereotaxic space containing a set of anatomical and functional labels annotated
at specific coordinates.
An individual brain can be spatially normalized into this standard space to incorporate the annotation information.
Furthermore, only in this same space that brain MR images can be compared to obtain statistical inference
of structural discrepancy.
MNI305 is a widely-used brain template, which was created by Montreal Neurological Institute from 305 brain
MRI volumes of Western normal subjects.
However, inter-ethnic difference of brain structure can be large.
Normalizing the brain to a template of different race may cause structural artefact due to the large
spatial distortion.
Therefore, a customized brain template is necessary for structural brain analysis for Easter people.
In this work, we develop associated algorithms and construct a Taiwanese brain template from a database
containing brain MRI volumes of Taiwanese for both genders.
First, we propose an estimation technique that can automatically determine the mid-sagittal plane for each
individual MRI.
Then, the anatomical landmark, anterior commissure (AC), is selected as the origin point and another anatomical
landmark, posterior commissure (PC), is selected such that the AC-PC line constitutes the mapping axis.
We choose an individual MRI as the representative brain and register all other MRIs to the same stereotaxic
coordinate space by aligning their mid-sagittal planes, origins, and mapping axes to those of the representative brain.
Finally, the brain template is obtained by averaging all of the spatially normalized brain MRIs.
In this study, we also demonstrate that the constructed Taiwanese brain template can be used to reduce
the amount of spatial normalization distortion when Taiwanese brain MRIs are involved in structural analysis.
Another finding shows that Taiwanese brain template is shorter and wider than Western templates.
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