ISSNIP Tutorial

Principles of Structural and Functional Magnetic Resonance Neuroimaging and Image Analysis.

Gary Egan

Head, Neuroinformatics Laboratory at the National Neuroscience Facility, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract:

This tutorial will consist of two 1.5 hour talks on :

Acquiring and pre-processing structural and functional Magnetic Resonance (MR) images of the brain; and
Analysing and interpreting structural and functional MR images of the brain.

The first talk will introduce the principles of acquiring structural and functional MR images, including:

	T1 and T2 weighted imaging (source of structural MR image contrast)
	blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) imaging (source of functional MR image contrast)
	diffusion tensor MR imaging (source of white matter tract imaging)

and pre-processing these images including:

	image registration methods
	image segmentation methods
	spatial normalization to standardized atlases.

The second talk will describe the analysis and interpretation of MR images including:

	independent components analysis
	quantitative volumetric analysis and morphological measures of structural MR images
	functional localization of brain activation;

and the interpretation of the results of brain measurements including an overview of:

	cellular description of micro-neuroanatomy
	gross neuroanatomy and functional neuroanatomy
	networks of cortical regions.

Gary Egan completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne and a post-doctoral fellowship at CERN, Geneva in the field of particle physics, studying quark and gluon interactions. In 1990 he changed his research field to brain imaging, and was appointed senior scientist at the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Centre, Melbourne, and later as head of the Neuroimaging Group, Howard Florey Institute, University of Melbourne. Dr Egan is currently an NHMRC Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Neuroinformatics Laboratory at the National Neuroscience Facility, Melbourne. His current research interests include ultra-high resolution in vivo MR imaging, structure-function correlations in the human brain, and the development of new image analysis methods. He has published over 80 papers and 100 abstracts in peer reviewed journals, and is the chairman of the 14th International Conference on Human Brain Mapping, to be held in Melbourne in 2008.