An MRI study of structural variations in schizophrenia using deformation field morphometry

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has an important role in investigating the changes in brain structure that are associated with schizophrenia. In this study, MRI scans of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia (37 males; 19 females; 17–42 years of age) were compared with those of an age- and sex-matched group of normal subjects (37 males; 19 females; 18–40 years of age). Based on the images of the healthy control subjects, we constructed a representative average brain template. Automated image analysis techniques were used to measure differences in the regional nonlinear deformation fields between the two groups. A deformation field, which measures the spatial transformation to deform a template of brain anatomy to each individual data, was obtained as a three-dimensional displacement vector in each voxel. There was a significantly greater magnitude of the deformation fields in the superior frontal and parietal lobes as well as in the cingulate gyrus connecting both lobes of the patients with schizophrenia than in those of healthy controls, suggesting that these cerebral regions have a significantly higher structural variability in schizophrenia.