The thickness of the cerebral cortex can provide valuable information about normal and abnormal neuroanatomy. High resolution MRI together with powerful image processing techniques has made it possible to perform these measurements automatically over the whole brain. Here we present a method for automatically generating voxelbased cortical thickness (VBCT) maps. This technique results in maps where each voxel in the grey matter is assigned a thickness value. Subvoxel measurements of thickness are possible using sub-sampling and interpolation of the image information. The method is applied to repeated MRI scans of a single subject from two MRI scanners to demonstrate its robustness and reproducibility. A simulated data set is used to show that small focal differences in thickness between two groups of subjects can be detected. We propose that the analysis of VBCT maps can provide results that are complementary to other anatomical analyses such as voxel-based morphometry.
Another challenging application of measuring thickness is estimation of the cortical thickness of the human brain from MRI data REF .
Voxel-based cortical thickness measurements in MRI
NeuroImage
NeuroImage
Medicine Computer Science