Quantifying the microstructural changes in the brain of patients with alcohol use disorder after abstinence via diffusion MRI

Details

Supervisors

Macq, Benoît ; Dricot, Laurence

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil biomédical

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increased interest for the characterization of neuropathologies, such as alcohol use disorder, using diffusion MRI. Diffusion MRI is an imaging technique based on the diffusion of water molecules, which can provide information about the microstructure of the brain. The goal of this report is to identify which diffusion-based models and their respective metrics best describe the microstructural changes observed during abstinence in different brain regions and to identify which of these regions are the most impacted. A patient with alcohol use disorder was scanned with a diffusion MRI sequence before and after a two week abstinence period from alcohol. A data processing pipeline was created to obtain the metrics of different models from the diffusion data and a selection of the most useful metrics was determined. A region-based analysis found that regions such as the corpus callosum, the limbic system and the cerebellar peduncles presented a high number of microstructural changes.