An MRI Study on Volumetric Changes in the Brain of Female Adolescents with Autism

This study attempts to identify regional differences in brain volume between the known brain disorders to detect autism with an integrated approach that uses several image-processing techniques. Neuroimages from 5 autistic 17 years old female patients and 10 female control (17 ± 1 years old), were used. These images were from dual-echo, fast spin echo slices (1,5 mm thickness) that were acquired through Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) scanners. The slices were segmented into gray matter and white matter. Several image-processing techniques such as global thresholding, adaptive thresholding and kmeans algorithm were used to calculate the volumetric data of the brain tissue. The results are analyzed with independent sample of t-tests to compare the outcome for the autistic subjects with control group. Previous structural neuroimaging studies were reviewed; these studies were integrated to obtain results that detect gray matter, white matter, and whole brain volumes. The literature suggests that there are different results for each age group of autistic people. The results show that there is no significant volumetric growth in whole brain between control group and autistic female adolescents; but larger white matter volume was determined in 17 years old female autistic adolescents.