SBIR-STTR Award

Quantitative measurements of the structure of the human brain in vivo have been found to be useful in the understanding of brain development, diseases, and injury but this type of analysis is difficult and time consuming to perform. A service is proposed that can efficiently provide quantitative macroscopic neuromorphometric analyses of MR brain images that will expand understanding of normal in vivo brain structure, document diagnoses and response to treatment, and allow the discovery and application of new treatments for brain disorders that appear as macroscopic structural changes. This service will be useful to an emerging market of Neuroscientists, drug companies, and eventually clinicians. As part of a long-range plan involving multiple types of services and products, an initial prototype system will be created by porting research software and methods. This prototype will be augmented and then evaluated by using a standard suite of test data and, as a complete example application, by comparing its results to measurements made the hippocampus in 30 brain scans using the research software. We will provide open source access to the basic software tool on an inexpensive hardware platform. The prototype will be considered feasible if the cost of service is low enough to be born by the potential market. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: This service will be used by; Neuroscientists studying brain structure in MRI and fMRI, drug companies and contract research organizations seeking image measurements as surrogate endpoints for drug trials, and ultimately clinicians diagnosing and measuring the progression and response to treatment of brain disorders such as Alzheimer's Disease, Schizophrenia, ADHD, etc.

Quantitative measurement, of the structure of the human brain in vivo have been found to be useful in the understanding of brain development, diseases, and injury but this type of analysis is difficult and time consuming to perform. A service is proposed that can efficiently provide quantitative macroscopic neuromorphometric analyses of MRI brain scans that will expand understanding of normal in vivo brain structure, document diagnoses and response to treatment, and allow the discovery and application of new treatments for brain disorders that appear as macroscopic structural changes. In Phase I we created and demonstrated the feasibility of a neuromorphometric analysis software platform (NASP) consisting of operating procedures and computer programs that makes brain measurement methods accessible at the clinical level. The main software application, "NVM" includes "SegMentor," a feature for tightly coupling measurement methods with the measurement tool. In Phase II, an existing automatic segmentation technique will be incorporated into the rest of the system. The entire system will be validated by applying it to real-world data and will be used to develop comprehensively documented neuroanatomical measurement techniques. The result of these efforts can be applied to clinical diagnosis and measuring the response to treatment in pharmaceutical trials.

Thesaurus Terms:
brain morphology, computer program /software, computer system design /evaluation, image processing, magnetic resonance imaging, neuroanatomy brain mapping, computer data analysis, hippocampus, morphometry, neuroscience bioimaging /biomedical imaging, clinical research, human data