Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Connectivity Domain: Analyzing Resting State Fmri Data Using Feature-Based Data-Driven And Model-Based Methods, Armin Iraji, Vince D. Calhoun, Natalie M. Wiseman, Esmaeil Davoodi-Bojd, Mohammad R. N. Avanaki, Zhifeng Kou

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research Publications

Spontaneous fluctuations of resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI) have been widely used to understand the macro-connectome of the human brain. However, these fluctuations are not synchronized among subjects, which leads to limitations and makes utilization of first-level model-based methods challenging. Considering this limitation of rsfMRI data in the time domain, we propose to transfer the spatiotemporal information of the rsfMRI data to another domain, the connectivity domain, in which each value represents the same effect across subjects. Using a set of seed networks and a connectivity index to calculate the functional connectivity for each seed network, we transform data into …

An Analysis Of Plasticity In The Rat Respiratory System Following Cervical Spinal Cord Injury And The Application Of Nanotechnology To Induce Or Enhance Recovery Of Diaphragm Function, Janelle Lorien Walker

Wayne State University Dissertations

Second cervical segment spinal cord hemisection (C2Hx) results in ipsilateral hemidiaphragm paralysis. However, the intact latent crossed phrenic pathway can restore function spontaneously over time or immediately following drug administration.

WGA bound fluorochromes were administered to identify nuclei associated with diaphragm function in both the acute and chronic C2Hx models. WGA is unique in that it undergoes receptor mediated endocytosis and is transsynaptically transported across select physiologically active synapses. Comparison of labeling in the acutely injured to the chronically injured rat provided an anatomical map of spinal and supraspinal injury induced synaptic plasticity. The plasticity occurs over time in the …

Toward Magnetic Resonance Only Treatment Planning: Distortion Mitigation And Image-Guided Radiation Therapy Validation, Ryan Glen Price

Wayne State University Dissertations

While MR-only treatment planning has shown promise, there are still several well-known challenges that are currently limiting widespread clinical implementation.

Firstly, MR images are affected by both patient-induced and system-level geometric distortions that can significantly degrade treatment planning accuracy. . In addition, the availability of comprehensive distortion analysis software is currently limited. Also while many groups have been working toward a synthetic CT solution, further study is needed on the implementation of synCTs as the reference datasets for linac-based image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) to help determine their robustness in an MR-only workflow.

A 36×43×2 cm3 phantom with 255 known landmarks …