The problem Short and long term objectives Metodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

HUMANS BRAIN CONNECTIVITY

Mnica Giraldo Chica

University of Barcelona / Universidad Politcnica de Catalua

Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Table of contents
The problem

Short and long term objectives

Methodology Results

What is left to do
Conclusions
Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

The problem (from the medical point of view)

When some damage occurs in the brain, often new paths are activated in order to reestablish the fallen connectivity between two ROIs. Doctors still dont understand how the human brain manages to do this. An advance in this research area could help physicians to control this process and accelerate or activate the healing of diverse brain diseases. Tractography is an important tool to solve this problem.

Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

The problem (from the engineering point of view)

Many tractography and images pre processing programs exists now a days, but their execution is very susceptible to human errors and have very high execution times, which is often very unacceptable when the amount of patients and images is high. For this, an automation of the whole process is strongly needed.

Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Long term objectives

Generation and comparison of connectivity matrices with the most common tractography programs.

Binary

Numerical

Selection of the best tools. Application of this results to solve the problem from the medical point of view.
Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Short term objectives

Automation of brain image pre processing and tractography

Automatically opens and calls these programs through their command line. Automatic execution of the whole pipeline in this programs

User friendly interface

Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Methodology
Necessary manual pre processing of the images. Analysis of the pre processing in MATLAB: Best parameters to be used. Images needed. Study of the scripts created in MATLAB for each step. Generalization of the pre processing:
Matlabcontrol.jar

Automatic scripts generation

Mnica Giraldo Chica

Scripts execution though calls to its command line

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Methodology
Analysis of the FSL pipeline: Manual execution of the tractography for some patients. Selection of the best parameters. Automation of the FSL pipeline:

Makes calls to the operating system, in the same way as the Command line
Mnica Giraldo Chica

The OS executes the FSL routines

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Results
Fast and reliable image pre processing and tractography execution. No human errors introduced during the processing pipeline. Automatic generation of the connectivity matrices. Joint of the different toolkits, even if they are installed in different computers and operating systems (use of sockets for remote connections). Platform independent tool (based on Java).
Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

What is left to do
In the short term: - Automatic generation of the connectivity matrices between every ROI in the brain with FSL. Further work: - Generation of the connectivity matrices with other programs. - Comparative study and selection of the best tools. - Apply brain tractography to patients before and after known crisis in order to locate and quantify changes in the brain.
Mnica Giraldo Chica

The problem Short and long term objectives Methodology Results What is left to do Conclusions

Conclusions
The final goal of this project is to be able to apply tractography to a better understanding of the humans brain connectivity and re generation. But to achieve this objective a long road needs to be constructed before. Creation of connectivity matrices have been done before, but what is needed now is to assure that they are reliable and that can be used for further investigations. Automation of the processes has help to construct the bases of these roads, so they are strong enough for the lot of work that is still left to do.
Mnica Giraldo Chica