Antonietta Pepe

Univeristy of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France · IMN, Institut des Maladies Neurodégénératives, UMR 5293

Significance Left-handedness occurs in roughly 10% of people, but whether it involves altered brain anatomy has remained unclear. We measured left to right asymmetry of the cerebral cortex in 28,802 right-handers and 3,062 left-handers. There were small average differences between the two handedness groups in brain regions important for hand contro...

We report on MRi-Share, a multi-modal brain MRI database acquired in a unique sample of 1870 young healthy adults, aged 18–35 years, while undergoing university-level education. MRi-Share contains structural (T1 and FLAIR), diffusion (multispectral), susceptibility-weighted (SWI), and resting-state functional imaging modalities. Here, we described...

The relationship between hippocampal subfield volumetry and verbal list-learning test outcomes have mostly been studied in clinical and elderly populations, and remain controversial. For the first time, we characterized a relationship between verbal list-learning test outcomes and hippocampal subfield volumetry on two large separate datasets of 447...

Human brain white matter undergoes a protracted maturation that continues well into adulthood. Recent advances in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) methods allow detailed characterizations of the microstructural architecture of white matter, and they are increasingly utilized to study white matter changes during development and aging. However, relat...

Roughly 10% of the human population is left-handed, and this rate is increased in some brain-related disorders. The neuroanatomical correlates of hand preference have remained equivocal. We re-sampled structural brain image data from 28,802 right-handers and 3,062 left-handers (UK Biobank population dataset) to a symmetrical surface template, and m...

Human brain white matter undergoes a protracted maturation that continues well into adulthood. Recent advances in diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) methods allow detailed characterizations of the microstructural architecture of white matter, and they are increasingly utilised to study white matter changes during development and ageing. However, rela...

The human cerebral hemispheres show a left-right asymmetrical torque pattern, which has been claimed to be absent in chimpanzees. The functional significance and developmental mechanisms are unknown. Here, we carried out the largest-ever analysis of global brain shape asymmetry in magnetic resonance imaging data. Three population datasets were used...

The cortical ribbon changes throughout a person's lifespan, with the most significant changes occurring during crucial development and aging periods. Changes during adulthood are rarely investigated due to the scarcity of neuroimaging data during this period. After one factor of this thinning process is intense ongoing intracortical myelination (MY...

We report on MRi-Share, a multi-modal brain MRI database acquired in a unique sample of 1,870 young healthy adults, aged 18 to 35 years, while undergoing university-level education. MRi-Share contains structural (T1 and FLAIR), diffusion (multispectral), susceptibility weighted (SWI), and resting-state functional imaging modalities. Here, we descri...

Previous studies have suggested that altered asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including dyslexia, schizophrenia, and autism. Shared genetic factors have been suggested to link PT asymmetry to these disorders. In a dataset of unrelated subjects from the general population (UK Biobank, N = 18,057...

The average human brain is characterized by a global left-right asymmetry of shape, including a well-known 'torque' on the fronto-occipital axis, and less-studied differences on the dorsal-ventral axis. Torque has been claimed to be human-specific. However, the functional significance and developmental mechanisms underlying the global aspects of br...

Previous studies have suggested that altered asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including dyslexia, schizophrenia, and autism. Shared genetic factors have been suggested to link PT asymmetry to these disorders. In a dataset of unrelated subjects from the general population (UK Biobank, N= 18,057)...

Understanding the link between structure, function and development in the brain is a key topic in neuroimaging that benefits from the tremendous progress of multi-modal MRI and its computational analysis. It implies, inter alia, to be able to parcellate the brain volume or cortical surface into biologically relevant regions. These parcellations may...

We investigated, in 445 healthy adults whose Heschl's gyrus (HG) gyrification patterns had been previously identified, how an in vivo MRI marker of intracortical myelination of HG and the planum temporale (PT) varied as a function of HG gyrification pattern and, in cases of duplication, of anatomical characteristics of the second HG (H2). By measur...

Understanding the link between structure, function and development in the brain is a key topic in neuroimaging that benefits from the tremendous progress of multi-modal MRI and its computational analysis. It implies, inter alia , to be able to parcellate the brain volume or cortical surface into biologically relevant regions. These parcellations ma...

Surface-based analysis is a tool of choice to study the anatomy and function of the cortex in adult and children brains. Common surface registration approaches are not adaptable to fetal data since data-driven mapping techniques are limited by the lack of structural features across all ges-tational ages. In this work, we adapt the HIP-HOP model-dri...

Many neuroimaging studies are based on the idea that there are distinct brain regions that are functionally or micro-anatomically homogeneous. Obtaining such regions in an au-tomatic way is a challenging task for fetal data due to the lack of strong and consistent anatomical features at the early stages of brain development. In this paper we propos...

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a transitional stage between age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease (AD). For the effective treatment of AD, it would be important to identify MCI patients at high risk for conversion to AD. In this study, we present a novel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)-based method for predicting the MCI-to-AD...

The study of anatomical brain asymmetries has been a topic of great interest in the neuroimaging community in the past decades. However, the accuracy of brain asymmetry measurements has been rarely investigated. In this study, we propose a fully automatic methodology for the quantitative validation of brain tissue asymmetries as measured by Voxel B...

We present a fully automatic method to segment the skull from 2-D ultrasound images of the fetal head and to compute the standard biometric measurements derived from the segmented images. The method is based on the minimization of a novel cost function. The cost function is formulated assuming that the fetal skull has an approximately elliptical sh...

This paper presents the evaluation results of the methods submitted to Challenge US: Biometric Measurements from Fetal Ultrasound Images, a segmentation challenge held at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging 2012. The challenge was set to compare and evaluate current fetal ultrasound image segmentation methods. It consisted of aut...

The study of the structural asymmetries in the human brain can assist the early diagnosis and progression of various neuropsychiatric disorders, and give insights into the biological bases of several cognitive deficits. The high inter-subject variability in cortical morphology complicates the detection of abnormal asymmetries especially if only sma...

In this work, we present a novel image and mesh processing pipeline for the computation of simplified Reeb graphs for closed triangle meshes of the human striatum extracted from 3D-T1 weighted MR images. The method uses active contours for computing the mesh partition and the simplified Reeb graph. Experimental results showed that simplified Reeb g...

Our fully automatic method to compute the biparietal diameter (BPD) and occipitofrontal diameter (OFD) from fetal ultrasound images is based on fitting an ellipse modelling the head contour of the fetus to ultrasound images. This is achieved by minimizing a cost function with respect to the parameters of the ellipse using a global multiscale multis...

In this work, we propose a novel space deformation model for local bending of 3D volumes and surfaces. The model can be easily controlled through accommodation of a few intuitive parameters. Experiments on volumes, parametric surfaces, and polygonal surfaces show that our method has increased modeling capabilities when compared to the previous spac...

In this work, we present a novel image and mesh processing pipeline for the computation of simplified Reeb graphs for closed triangle meshes of the human striatum extracted from 3D-T1 weighted MR images. The method uses active contours for computing the mesh partition and the simplified Reeb graph. Experimental results showed that simplified Reeb g...

In this work, we propose a novel space deformation model for local bending of 3D volumes and surfaces. The model can be easily controlled through accommodation of a few intuitive parameters. Experiments on volumes, parametric surfaces, and polygonal surfaces show that our method has increased modeling capabilities when compared to the previous spac...

In this study, we investigate the capability of the well-known maximum likelihood expectation maximization (MLEM) method in handling the incomplete sinogram reconstruction. MLEM method is known to be able to deal with the missing parts via system matrix modeling. We propose sequentially applied regularized MLEM method for the image reconstruction f...

The study of the structural brain asymmetries can prove useful for the understanding of the functional brain lateralizations, and to examine the progression and assist the early diagnosis of various neuropsychiatric disorders. This work introduces a novel automatic method for the local (vertex-level) statistical shape analysis of gross cerebral hem...

The study of the structural asymmetries in the human brain can assist the early diagnosis and progression of various neuropsychiatric disorders, and give insights into the biological bases of several cognitive deficits. The high inter-subject variability in cortical morphology complicates the detection of abnormal asymmetries especially if only sma...