Event
M.S. Thesis Defense: Qi Wang
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
10:00 a.m.
AVW 2328
Maria Hoo
301 405 3681
mch@umd.edu
ANNOUNCEMENT: M.S. Thesis Defense
Name: Qi Wang
Committee:
Professor Joseph JaJa, Chair
Professor Amitabh Varshney
Professor Rama Chellappa
Date/Time: Wednesday, July 16, 2014 at 10:00 a.m.
Location: AVW 2328
Title: Connectivity based parcellation and brain atlas generation - extracting connectome information for Schizophrenia research
Abstract:
Traditional brain atlases are mainly based on hand-crafted anatomical structures, ignoring the useful connectivity pattern information. In our work we use diffusion weighted imaging data to incorporate connectivity information into atlas generation. We use FSL to process the data to extract the connectivity matrix. The brain parcellation problem is then formulated as a min-cut problem on a big, sparse graph. Spectral clustering and an original multi-class Hopfield network (MHN) method is applied to solve the problem, each working with a different analytical framework: MHN works in the diffusion space to generate individual parcellations, while spectral clustering works on standard space averaged connectome to generate group level atlases. Group study of brain images with Schizophrenia is conducted, showing significant improvement in accuracy for disease diagnosis using features extracted with the proposed parcellation scheme. Hypothesis test was performed on local structures to explore possible structural causes of the disease.
