Neuropsychological Dysfunction and Neuroimaging Abnormalities

In Neurologically Intact Adults with Sickle Cell Disease

The overall goal of this subcontract is to determine the extent to which changes of brain structure are responsible for cognitive changes in the subjects of this PPG.  Specifically this subcontract will  quantify changes on brain  MRIs on subjects entered into this project. Therefore this subcontract will: 1) provide scientific oversight into the acquisition of the MRI studies 2) provide quality control as the studies are acquired 3) arrange for transfer of the images to this laboratory 4) read the images and put them into a format so that they can be processed by our laboratory 5) segment the images into gray matter (cortical and subcortical) white matter, CSF, white matter lesions, lacunes, cortical strokes  6) select an appropriate "reference brain" and calculate the transformations so that the MRIs of all subjects care in the same space as the reference brain 7) mark the reference brain into right and left frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes, cerebellum, midbrain, and brain stem 8) using the non linear transformations  transfer these markings to all MRIs in the data set so that the segmentation data in 5 above is now divided into brain regions  9) put all data into a data base so that correlations between the quantified imaging data and clinical data ( especially neuropsychological tests) can be made.

It is expected that the results of this subcontract will provide important new information concerning the mechanism by which cognitive impairments occur in the sickle cell population.