Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, February 23, 2015
Resting-state fMRI Study of Pediatric Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Preprocessing Optimization and Clinical Observations
Remi Patriat (student of Dr. Rasmus Birn)
Research Assistant, Dept of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA
Pediatric post-traumatic stress disorder (pPTSD) is a mental illness that currently has no effective treatment. In fact, to date, behavioral therapy only works for some children and no medication has been proved to help cure patients. Developing new therapies requires a better understanding of the differences in pediatric versus adult PTSD.
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a reliable technique to map the functional organization of the brain particularly useful for a clinical setting as it does not rely on task performance, contrary to task fMRI. Rs-fMRI can shed light on the underlying neuronal differences between pPTSD patients and healthy controls. This modality, however, suffers from many artifact arising from in-scanner motion and the patient’s physiology (breathing and heart rate changes). Another drawback is a lack of standardization in the pre-processing and the processing of the data. Finding the optimum pre-processing pipeline is key to obtaining the best and the most consistent results that will lead to a better understanding of the brain. In this presentation, we go over the reliability of rs-fMRI, new motion correction preprocessing steps, and the application of rs-fMRI to a population of pPTSD patients.