This page is very much under construction ... but what you can expect to find here once these pages are filled in is information about running cortical analysis with the tools developed within the MINC framework. This will include documentation, list of references, i.e. just about anything that could be useful to both end-users and developers. So please check back often!
The goal of the research described in these pages is to take imaging information, usually from MRI, run that data for each subject through an image processing pipeline to generate a series of metrics about the cortex of each subject, and then use that information to ask question about the structure of the cortex in both healthy and diseased populations.
The key concept behind the structure of the cerebral cortex is its thickness. The goal is to measure the distance between the white matter surface and the grey matter surface across the entire cortex in order to analyse regional variations within individuals, and more importantly, across subjects. The basic theory driving this analysis is that a thinning of the cortex in one patch of the cerebrum indicates a relative loss of function (and the more controversial correlate being that a thickening - at least one not driven by lesions - corresponds with an increase in function).