Diffusion MRI

Question 1

What is voxel-based morphometry used for? How does it work?

Answer 1

Seeing changes in brain volume and can be compared with cognitive tasks, clinical scores and other people
Segments brain into different tissue and then normalised (compares) with a reference MRI image of the brain. Each voxel corresponds and you use a statistical model to see the changes.

Question 2

What is an example of study that used voxel-based morphometry to see changes in the brain volume?

Answer 2

Maguire - hippocampi of taxi drivers
Larger posterior and smaller anterior
Correlated with time as taxi driver

Question 3

What is dMRI sensitive to?

Answer 3

The motion of water molecule within the tissue
Sensitive to properties of white matter

Question 4

What is the limitation of dMRI?

Answer 4

It isn’t cell specific

Question 5

How can we solve the issue of cell specificity in dMRI?

Answer 5

MR Spectroscopy

Question 6

What does MR spectroscopy do?

Answer 6

Identifies metabolites but quantifies the area under each peak
These metabolites are fairly cell specific eg NAA only found in neurons and axons