Quantitative Structural Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analyses: Methodological Overview and Application to Rett Syndrome

Abstract

Congenital genetic disorders often present with neurological manifestations such as neurodevelopmental disorders, motor developmental retardation, epilepsy, and involuntary movement. Through qualitative morphometric evaluation of neuroimaging studies, remarkable structural abnormalities, such as lissencephaly, polymicrogyria, white matter lesions, and cortical tubers, have been identified in these disorders, while no structural abnormalities were identified in clinical settings in a large population. Recent advances in data analysis programs have led to significant progress in the quantitative analysis of anatomical structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion-weighted MRI tractography, and these approaches have been used to investigate psychological and congenital genetic disorders. Evaluation of morphometric brain characteristics may contribute to the identification of neuroimaging biomarkers for early diagnosis and response evaluation in patients with congenital genetic diseases. This mini-review focuses on the methodologies and attempts employed to study Rett syndrome using quantitative structural brain MRI analyses, including voxel- and surface-based morphometry and diffusion-weighted MRI tractography. The mini-review aims to deepen our understanding of how neuroimaging studies are used to examine congenital genetic disorders.