Morphological changes of aging brain structure in MRI analysis

The human brain atrophies with aging. By investigating the morphological change of brain structure and comparing with the deformation of normal aging, we can diagnose the cerebral diseases such as Alzheimer´s diseases, Perkinson disease, etc. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a good diagnostic tool because it is non-invasive to the human body, and it can take the thin-sectional images with high contrast. This paper shows a method to investigate the morphological structure of the human brain using MRI. The method segments the brain region, liner and non-liner registration to a standard brain, and inverse wrapping from the standard brain. By giving some landmarks to the standard brain, we can obtain the landmark position of each subject. We investigate the morphological change using the position changes. The method has been applied to open database (IXI dataset) that contains 619 subjects whose age is 19.98-83.62 years old.