Zhaoying Han1,2, Tricia Thornton-Wells3, Elisabeth Dykens3, Anuj Srivastava4, Zhaohua Ding2, John C. Gore2, Benoit Dawant1
1Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA; 2Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science, Nashville, TN, USA; 3Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, Nashville, TN, USA; 4Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Anatomical differences between twelve subjects with Williams Syndrome (WS) and twelve age and gender matched typically-developing (TD) subjects are characterized based on group averages. High resolution MR images were acquired and, for each group, a volume with average intensity and shape was computed iteratively using non-rigid co-registration. Qualitative analysis of central sulcus and quantitative shape analysis of brain volumes, corpus callosum parameters and contours based on group averages agree well with those of individual volumes. This analysis is fully automatic; so it can be used as an efficient technique to identify morphological differences between populations.