Brain structures identification based on feature descriptor

Traumatic Brain Injury -TBI- -1- is defined as an acute event that causes certain damage to areas of the brain. TBI may result in a significant impairment of an individuals physical, cognitive and psychosocial functioning. The main consequence of TBI is a dramatic change in the individuals daily life involving a profound disruption of the family, a loss of future income capacity and an increase of lifetime cost. One of the main challenges of TBI Neuroimaging is to develop robust automated image analysis methods to detect signatures of TBI, such as: hyper-intensity areas, changes in image contrast and in brain shape. The final goal of this research is to develop a method to identify the altered brain structures by automatically detecting landmarks on the image where signal changes and to provide comprehensive information to the clinician about them. These landmarks identify injured structures by co-registering the patient?s image with an atlas where landmarks have been previously detected. The research work has been initiated by identifying brain structures on healthy subjects to validate the proposed method. Later, this method will be used to identify modified structures on TBI imaging studies.

Functional hubs in mild cognitive impairment

We investigate how hubs of functional brain networks are modified as a result of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition causing a slight but noticeable decline in cognitive abilities, which sometimes precedes the onset of Alzheimer's disease. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate the functional brain networks of a group of patients suffering from MCI and a control group of healthy subjects, during the execution of a short-term memory task. Couplings between brain sites were evaluated using synchronization likelihood, from which a network of functional interdependencies was constructed and the centrality, i.e. importance, of their nodes was quantified. The results showed that, with respect to healthy controls, MCI patients were associated with decreases and increases in hub centrality respectively in occipital and central scalp regions, supporting the hypothesis that MCI modifies functional brain network topology, leading to more random structures.