Analysis of Cortical Thickness Indicating Cingulate Gyrus and Temporal Gyrus Incrassation in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Due to Mining Disaster

Abstract

MRI studies in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have focused primarily on manual based hippocampal volumetry, which is located in the subcortical. However, the cortical reduction or increase caused especially by thickness changes has not been well investigated. Recent advances in computational analysis provide new opportunities to use fully automatic techniques to measure cortical thickness, along with a method called voxel-based morphometry that enables an exploration of structural changes throughout the brain by applying statistical parametric mapping (SPM) to high-resolution MRI. In this paper, Laplacian method was used to estimate cortical thickness and the thickness maps were analyzed by SPM5. Comparison was performed between 14 survivors of mining disaster with PTSD and 11 survivors of the same event without PTSD. The results indicate that in the cingulate gyrus and temporal gyrus, the cortical thickness of survivors with PTSD is larger than those without PTSD.