Morphometry BIRN
Morphometry BIRN participants are examining neuroanatomical correlates of neuropsychiatric illnesses in such disorders as unipolar depression, mild Alzheimer's disease, and mild cognitive impairment.
Through large-scale analyses of patient population data acquired and pooled across sites, these scientists are investigating whether brain structural differences correlate to symptoms such as memory dysfunction or depression and whether specific structural differences distinguish diagnostic categories.
Goals
The Morphometry BIRN project is creating a nation-wide database that will advance the use of biomedical imaging for diagnoses and treatment of neuropsychiatric illness.
The database will allow investigators to share both clinical data (including biomedical imaging data) and software (analysis and visualization tools). By sharing clinical data across multiple sites, the populations of patients investigated can be expanded thus improving the statistical accuracy of the results. Importantly this database is extensible, allowing integration with other biomedical research programs such as genomics.
The structural neuroimaging component of the project is integrating MR based structural neuroimaging data acquisition and analysis tools with the databasing and visualization tools from the SDSC partners and applying them to the clinical neuroimaging studies that are currently being collected across the collaborating sites. Importantly, this project is integrated with the other two BIRN projects to enable the investigation of both human and mouse structural and functional neuroimaging data. More from the BIRN site.
Participants
- Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital
- Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke Univ.
- Brain Imaging Center, UC Irvine
- Center for Image Science, Johns Hopkins Univ.
- Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Washington Univ., St. Louis
- Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- fMRI Research Center, UC San Diego
- Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, UC Los Angeles
- Mallinkrodt Institute of Radiology, Washington Univ., St. Louis
- Neuropsychiatric Imaging Research Laboratory, Duke Univ.
- Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham & Women's Hospital
Research
The initial focus of this project has been on elderly patients with unipolar depression, elderly patients at risk for the development of dementia, elderly patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and appropriately matched controls for each cohort. The data collected from each site will be made available through the proposed network to the other groups in the consortium to use specific image analytic tools to study neuroanatomical changes of relevance to depression and memory dysfunction. The federated database is significantly increasing the statistical power to test research hypotheses by allowing the combination of diverse data sets.
The related communications infrastructure facilitates the sharing of analytic software programs and algorithms among sites and allows for the analysis of data sets with a variety of approaches. These analytic tools would otherwise be available only at the sites in which they were developed. By facilitating the comparison of findings across different neuropsychiatric illnesses, a federated database also permits us to identify what is distinctive to each illness and what is common.
