tailieunhanh - BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING TRENDS IN ELECTRONICS, COMMUNICATIONS AND SOFTWARE_2

Rapid technological developments in the last century have brought the field of biomedical engineering into a totally new realm. Breakthroughs in materials science, imaging, electronics and, more recently, the information age have improved our understanding of the human body. As a result, the field of biomedical engineering is thriving, with innovations that aim to improve the quality and reduce the cost of medical care. | Part 3 Imaging and Data Processing 17 Parkinson s Disease Diagnosis and Prognosis Using Diffusion Tensor Medical Imaging Features Fusion Roxana Oana Teodorescu1 Vladimir-Ioan Cretu2 and Daniel Racoceanu3 1 2 Politehnica University of Timisoara 1 Universite de Franche-Comte Besancon 3French National Centre for Scientific Research CNRS fimage and Pervasive Access Lab - IPAL UMI CNRS 1 2Romania 1 3France 3Singapore 1. Introduction Despite important advances in medical imaging cognitive testing methods are still used almost exclusively nowadays for Parkinson s Disease PD diagnosis. These tests are evaluated and scored using predefined scales representing the disease severity like UPDRS Unified Parkinson s Disease Rating Scale or H Y Hoehn and Yahr scale. Using the same scales our objective is to include information extracted and fused from different medical imaging modalities in order to obtain a quantification of the disease evolution for diagnosis and prognosis purposes. The dopamine one of the main neurotransmitters is lost when PD is installed. By the time the disease can be identified 80-90 of the dopamine is no longer produced Today 2009 . Medical studies concluded that the Substantia Nigra a small anatomical region situated in the midbrain is the producer of dopamine Chan et al. 2007 . The same anatomical region contains the motor fibres and the effect of the dopamine lost affects these fibers as the patients lose their motor functions and start trembling once the disease starts manifesting. The importance of the motor fibers for the evolution and the early detection of the disease represent a major medical motivation to set up a method able to extract and quantify abnormalities in the strationigral tract. As recently a match between the dopamine level in the Substantia Nigra SN and the Parkinson s disease evolution has been detected Chan et al. 2007 we are using this information further as we are studying the area where the Substantia Nigra SN produces the .