Autism Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Autism, including details on symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, causes, effects.

Cortical thickness analysis in autism with heat kernel smoothing.

Chung MK, Robbins SM, Dalton KM, Davidson RJ, Alexander AL, Evans AC

Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin, 1210 West Dayton Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. mchung@stat.wisc.edu

We present a novel data smoothing and analysis framework for cortical thickness data defined on the brain cortical manifold. Gaussian kernel smoothing, which weights neighboring observations according to their 3D Euclidean distance, has been widely used in 3D brain images to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. When the observations lie on a convoluted brain surface, however, it is more natural to assign the weights based on the geodesic distance along the surface. We therefore develop a framework for geodesic distance-based kernel smoothing and statistical analysis on the cortical manifolds. As an illustration, we apply our methods in detecting the regions of abnormal cortical thickness in 16 high functioning autistic children via random field based multiple comparison correction that utilizes the new smoothing technique.

Published 26 April 2005 in Neuroimage, 25(4): 1256-65.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2004-2008 Autism Research Today. All Rights Reserved.