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Genetic Contributions To Brain Fiber Architecture And Neuroanatomical Alterations In Alcohol Dependent Individuals : A Correlation Study, Vibhati Kulkarny

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Alcohol dependence (AD) is a complex addictive disorder, affecting 5.4% of the general population during a lifetime (Kessler, 2005) and has a complex heterogenous phenotype, with behavioral, morphological, and genetic components. Alcohol use can cause gray matter and white matter tissue damage. The extent of alcoholisms effect on brain matter structure in young adults is less known. Assessement of low and high alcohol dependent individuals was derived from DSM-IV. FSL based Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and quantitative fiber tracking derived from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) assessed morphological alterations of 6 gray matter structures involved in addiction and 10 white matter …

Hippocampal And Anterior Cingulate Cortex Volumes In Amnestic And Non-Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment, Elizabeth R. Tuminello

Master's Theses

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a syndrome thought to fall between cognitively normal aging and dementia. Although much research has investigated the structural neuroimaging correlates of amnestic MCI, little research has been done on the imaging correlates of non-amnestic MCI. Even less research has examined the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region important in executive functions (EFs), in these patients. This study attempted to address this gap by examining hippocampal and ACC volumes among amnestic and non-amnestic MCI patients and cognitively normal controls. Those with amnestic MCI were expected to have smaller hippocampal volumes than controls and those with non-amnestic …

Imaging The Vasculature With Susceptibility Weighted Imaging: Applications And Analysis, Samuel Barnes

Wayne State University Dissertations

Modern magnetic resonance imaging sequences allow detailed non-invasive imaging of both the arteries and veins. This work is divided into four sections that examine different applications and analysis of these sequences.

Susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) typically generates excellent negative venous contrast. Techniques to generate positive arterial contrast in SWI images without degrading the venous contrast with a single echo are examined. By using high isotropic resolution and high readout bandwidth flow losses can be minimized (generating good arterial contrast) even at the long echo times required for good venous contrast. A downsampling filter is then used to restore lost venous …

Quantification Of Vascular Parametric Indices Using Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Areen Khaled Al.Bashir

Wayne State University Dissertations

Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) is a non-invasive method used to evaluate the biological activity in early clinical trials of novel drugs targeting the tumor vasculature using gadolinium-DTPA (Gd) as a contrast agent. However, it has some limitations, such as reproducibility, data acquisition times, the presence of noise, extracting contrast concentration, estimating T1 relaxation and estimating pharmacokinetic parameters.

In this work, a new approach to used fixed T1(0) which provides more reproducible DCE results has been introduced. Using this new algorithm to quantify the vascular changes in DCE-MRI, a pre-clinical renal cell carcinoma (RCC) tumor model was used to …

Development Of Multi-Shot Parse Mri Techniques, Rajiv G. Menon

All ETDs from UAB

Fast imaging Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) techniques such as Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) often suffer from artifacts such as signal dropouts, geometric distortions and susceptibility artifacts due to background gradients. Parameter Assessment by Retrieval from Signal Encoding (PARSE) was introduced as a single shot, inverse estimation technique that models the MRI process more accurately and estimates the initial transverse magnetization, M0 and its phase, the decay rate R2* and local frequency at each pixel. This technique is devoid of the aforementioned artifacts seen in EPI techniques. The goal of this work is to develop multi-shot parameter assessment by retrieval from …