MULTIMODALITY MULTIDIMENSIONAL IMAGE-ANALYSIS OF CORTICAL AND SUBCORTICAL PLASTICITY IN THE RAT-BRAIN

In this work, we developed and implemented a multimodality multidimens ional imaging system which is capable of generating and displaying ana tomical and functional images of selected structures and processes wit hin a vertebrate's central nervous system (CNS). The functional images an generated from [C-14]-2-deoxy-D-glucose (2DG) autoradiography wher eas the anatomic images are derived from cytochrome oxidase (GO) histo chemistry. This multi-modality imaging system has been used to study m echanisms underlying information processing in the rat brain. We have applied this technique to visualize and measure the plasticity (deform ation) observed in the rat's whisker system due to neonatal lesioning of selected peripheral sensory organs. Application of this imaging sys tem revealed detailed information about the shape, size, and direction ality of selected cortical and subcortical structures. Previous 2-D im aging techniques were unable to deliver such holistic information. Ano ther important issue addressed in this work is related to image regist ration problems. We developed an image registration technique which em ploys extrinsic fiduciary marks for alignment and is capable of regist ering images with subpixel accuracy. It uses the information from all available fiduciary marks to promote alignment of the sections and to avoid propagation of errors across a serial data set.