Fan-Pei Gloria Yang1, Yao-Chia Shih2, 3, Ming-Chieh Mindy Fang1, Kayako Matsuo3, Shen-Hsing Annabel Chen4, Toshiharu Nakai5, Wen-Yih Issac Tseng3, 6
1Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan; 2Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 3Center for Optoelectronic Biomedicine, National Taiwan University College of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan; 4Division of Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; 5National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Aichi, Japan; 6Department of Medical Imaging, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
Age related decreases in fractional anisotropy (FA) and increases in mean diffusivity (MD) were observed across the entire white matter (WM) skeleton as well as in specific WM tracts. In this study, TBSS was applied to FA and MD images to examine the differences in WM integrity between healthy elderly and young participants. The efficient registration by TBSS successfully demonstrated the differences between healthy young and elderly groups. FA and MD shared the most significant difference in corona radiata. In conclusion, the findings demonstrate the effectiveness of TBSS as a population-wise measure of the WM change on a voxel-by-voxel basis.