Abstract #1429

Multiple Fiber Diffusion Anisotropy Analysis in Autistic Children

Zhenyu Zhou^1,2, Weihong Guo³, Tianyu Tang², Wei Liu¹, Bradley S. Peterson¹, Yijun Liu², Dongrong Xu¹

¹MRI Unit, Psychiatry, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA; ²Psychiatry, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA; ³Mathematics, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA

A new Diffusion Anisotropy Index R4 is developed for characterizing the degree of fiber crossing in DTI data, using a measure of apparent diffusion coefficient and a method based on spherical harmonic series. We then used R4 to investigate the relationship between diffusion anisotropy and multiple fibers crossing within individual voxels. Group differences of FA and R4 were computed respectively based on DT-MRI data of six autistic children and six healthy controls. We found that in the autistic population, brain regions where fibers are highly crossing (corpus callosum/lateral ventricle and arched fiber/precentral gyrus) are featuring with high R4 and low FA values simultaneously, indicating possibly a different mechanism other than pathological abnormality in white matter that causes low FA.