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Abstract #3651

A Permutation Test Statistical Analysis of Learning Induced DTI Changes

Ido Tavor1, Shlomi Lifshits2, Shir Hofstetter1, Yaniv Assaf1

1Department of Neurobiology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; 2Department of Statistics and Operations Research, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel


Diffusion MRI is widely used in recent years to investigate the relation between brain structure and cognitive abilities, by scanning subjects before and after a learning task. Methodologies applied in such studies require spatial normalization procedure and a statistical comparison in the group level. We propose an approach to execute a permutation test for performing statistical comparison between 2 DTI scans in the single subject level. The main principle is to examine in which voxels the change in DTI parameters is bigger than the inherent noise. We demonstrate that structural brain changes are detectable using such a method.