Soyoung Choi1,
Anand A. Joshi2, Chitresh Bhushan2, Vincent J. Schmithorst3,
Stefan Bluml4, David W. Shattuck5, Richard M. Leahy2,
Hanna Damasio1, Ashok Panigrahy3, Jessica L. Wisnowski6,
7
1Dana
and David Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Institute, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 2Signal and Image
Processing Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA,
United States; 3Radiology, Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of
UPMC, Pittsburgh, PA, United States; 4Department of Radiology,
Children Hospital of Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 5Laboratory
of Neuro Imaging, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, United States; 6Brain
and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA,
United States; 7Radiology,
Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, Pittsburgh, PA, United
States
Multimodal magnetic resonance (MR) imaging is increasingly becoming the standard in clinical practice and research yielding synergistic information regarding brain structure and brain function. We examined the relations among the absolute concentration of of n-acetyl-aspartate (NAA; quantitated from MR spectroscopy), fractional anisotropy (FA) and diffusivity metrics (ADC, AD, RD) calculated from DTI scans and volumetric and cortical surface area measurements computed from T1-weighted scans in standardized GM and WM regions. Our most significant findings were of associations between NAA and both FA and RD metrics in the white matter and suggest that together these metrics reflect neuronal/axonal packing density.