Multimodal imaging focused on meso-cortico-limbic system and its specificity for psychiatric diseases
Poster B52, Friday, October 21, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Le Baron
Shinsuke Koike1, Kentaro Morita1, Eisuke Sakakibara1, Naohiro Okada1, Kiyoto Kasai1; 1Univ of Tokyo
Introduction
Meso-cortico-limbic system is thought to be a core neural basis for positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia and depressive symptoms in major depression, however, little neuroimaging studies has been conducted focused on this system. Recently advances in neuroimaging techniques has enabled us to explore micro structures in the brain and their function using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Thus, we investigated using these techniques focused on meso-cortico-limbic system. Then, we explored its specificity among psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia and major depression.
Methods
First, we used T1-weighted brain images from 20 healthy participants in this study. Several analysis methods were tested for validation to detect the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the midbrain, the nucleus accumbens (NAc), and subareas in the prefrontal cortex (e.g orbitofrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate). Second, if we can acquire enough validity for the methods, MRI data from 20 patients with schizophrenia and 20 patients with major depression were analyzed to explore disease-specific characteristics in meso-cortico-limbic system. This study is approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Medicine, The University of Tokyo, and all participants gave written informed consents to this study.
Results and discussion
The results will be shown in the conference. Since the disturbance of meso-cortico-limbic system is a core hypothesis for psychiatric symptoms, the results could interpret the pathophysiology of psychiatric diseases from neuroimaging.
Topic Area: Neuroimaging