Structural MRI provides the anatomical reference nearly every other modality is registered to, and supplies the morphometric measures — cortical thickness, subcortical volume — that normative models are typically built on. T2w and FLAIR contrasts are what make white matter lesions visible.
Data¶
Essentially every dataset in this book includes structural MRI, since it is required to process the other modalities:
Processing¶
Organize as BIDS
Check quality with MRIQC — structural QC is worth doing carefully, because downstream registration failures usually trace back to it
Anatomical preprocessing is bundled into fMRIPrep and QSIPrep rather than run separately
FreeSurfer produces the surface reconstruction and morphometric measures themselves — and fMRIPrep has usually already run it for you
Note that structural measures are particularly sensitive to scanner, so pooling cortical thickness across sites needs harmonization before it means anything.
CNS Projects¶
Julia-Katharina Pfarr — cortical thickness and subcortical volume as the measures underlying a lifespan normative model
Sima Abbasi Habashi — T1-weighted and FLAIR imaging to quantify white matter hyperintensity burden
Diellor Basha — structural MRI alongside PET and CSF measures in preclinical Alzheimer’s
Josh Neudorf — cortical thickness as a region attribute in graph learning models