Brain Imaging Methods
The development of sensitive and sophisticated neuroimaging techniques is an important and central resource for many MNC investigations. These studies are focused upon measuring changes in the brain across adolescence to adulthood, which is related to the development of various types of mental illness. We have developed new imaging and research techniques, which allow us to map the progression of brain changes across all illness stages. These various methods and other standard processes have been integrated and combined to produce an imaging analysis “Pipeline”. The MNC researchers have developed and formalized the Neuropsychiatry Imaging Laboratory (NIL) Image Processing Pipeline to handle the large number of magnetic resonance images that the MNC processes. The Pipeline consists of the loading and pre-processing steps needed for analysis of brain scans, the various methodological protocols for analysing images, and the appropriate storing of data and metadata.