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Brain microstructure imaging from neurosurgery to psychiatry
Last modified: 2017-05-22
Abstract
Microstructure imaging provides insight into the architecture of cerebral tissues at the cellular level. By mapping and joining the orientation of cellular membranes at each location, tractography enables the identification of white matter fascicles. Tractography is used in neurosurgery for pre-surgical planning to map important white matter pathways that surround the tumour that needs to be resected. But microstructure imaging holds promise for characterising many more properties than simple cellular orientations, from myelin sheath thickness to glial cell concentration. Such properties may uniquely identify pathological and physiological processes occurring in the brain and hence may serve as biomarkers for the diagnosis of disease and for assessing response to treatment. Those advances are particularly awaited in psychiatry wherein phenotypes may be better defined and early recognition of response to therapies is critical. In this talk, I will discuss these opportunities and I will present some of the challenges that lie ahead of us before we can fully embrace them.