GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY
Grant: $169,169 - National Institutes of Health - Jun. 5, 2009
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Award Description: Title: Reconstruction and Mapping of Human Brain Vasculature Description: This project aims at building digital reconstructions of the brain arterial network from magnetic resonance image data, characterizing the arterial morphometry, and constructing a vascular atlas of the brain. This will allow comparisons of normal and pathological conditions with the objective of better understanding the mechanisms driving cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke and aneurysms. This understanding is important for improving current evaluation and treatment of patients with cerebrovascular diseases.
Project Description: A total of 61 digital reconstructions of the brain arterial network have been created from high resolution 3T magnetic resonance angiography images of normal subjects. The digital reconstructions use a vector representation to describe the local arterial diameter and branching pattern. These vectors representations have been created by manual tracing of the vascular structures on the MR images.Quality checks of the vascular reconstructions have been carried out. In particular, basic checks such as searching for zero diameter branches, self intersecting branches, overlapping branches, etc. have been completed. More checks and tests are currently being performed. These include visual inspection of the vascular reconstruction superposed to volume and slice renderings of the MR images in order to verify the topology and geometry of the arterial network. Additionally, the reconstructions are checked for possible intersections between arterial branches. For this purpose, each arterial branch is first represented with a cubic spline and a cylindrical surface triangulation is generated along each branch. Then, the intersection between every pair of branches is checked by testing whether the corresponding surface triangulations intersect. If vessel intersections are detected, the digital reconstructions are corrected.Once the digital vascular reconstructions have been created and verified, we will focus on analyzing the morphometric properties of the brain arterial network. In particular we will quantify the statistical distribution of morphometric characteristics such as branch length, branch tortuosity, bifurcation angles, bifurcation asymmetry (area ratios), fractal dimension, etc.These measures will be carried out for each arterial tree emanating from the circle of Willis, for each brain hemisphere and for each subject, and compared.
Infrastructure Description: Not Applicable
Jobs Summary: No jobs were created. Two Graduate Research Assistants and one 12 Month Research Faculty were retained. (Total jobs reported: 0)
Project Status: Less Than 50% Completed
This award's data was last updated on Jun. 5, 2009. Help expand these official descriptions using the wiki below.
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