Fabene Paolo F, Farace Paolo, Brambilla Paolo, Andreone Nicola, Cerini Roberto, Pelizza Luisa, Versace Amelia, Rambaldelli Gianluca, Birbaumer Niels, Tansella Michele, Sbarbati Andrea
Department of Morphological and Biomedical Sciences, Section of Anatomy and Histology, University of Verona, Italy.
J Anat. 2007 Jan;210(1):122-8. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2006.00659.x.
A new type of magnetic resonance imaging analysis, based on fusion of three-dimensional reconstructions of time-to-peak parametric maps and high-resolution T1-weighted images, is proposed in order to evaluate the perfusion of selected volumes of interest. Because in recent years a wealth of data have suggested the crucial involvement of vascular alterations in mental diseases, we tested our new method on a restricted sample of schizophrenic patients and matched healthy controls. The perfusion of the whole brain was compared with that of the caudate nucleus by means of intrasubject analysis. As expected, owing to the encephalic vascular pattern, a significantly lower time-to-peak was observed in the caudate nucleus than in the whole brain in all healthy controls, indicating that the suggested method has enough sensitivity to detect subtle perfusion changes even in small volumes of interest. Interestingly, a less uniform pattern was observed in the schizophrenic patients. The latter finding needs to be replicated in an adequate number of subjects. In summary, the three-dimensional analysis method we propose has been shown to be a feasible tool for revealing subtle vascular changes both in normal subjects and in pathological conditions.
为了评估选定感兴趣区域的灌注情况，我们提出了一种基于时间峰值参数图的三维重建与高分辨率T1加权图像融合的新型磁共振成像分析方法。近年来，大量数据表明血管改变在精神疾病中起关键作用，因此我们在一小部分精神分裂症患者及相匹配的健康对照中测试了我们的新方法。通过受试者内分析比较了全脑与尾状核的灌注情况。正如预期的那样，由于脑血管模式，在所有健康对照中，尾状核的峰值时间明显低于全脑，这表明所建议的方法具有足够的灵敏度，即使在小体积的感兴趣区域也能检测到细微的灌注变化。有趣的是，在精神分裂症患者中观察到的模式不太均匀。后一发现需要在足够数量的受试者中进行重复验证。总之，我们提出的三维分析方法已被证明是一种可行的工具，可用于揭示正常受试者和病理状态下的细微血管变化。
