Abstract
Brain cancer and neurological injuries, such as stroke, are life-threatening conditions for which further research is needed to overcome the many challenges associated with providing optimal patient care. Multivariate analysis (MVA) is a class of pattern recognition technique involving the processing of data that contains multiple measurements per sample. MVA can be used to address a wide variety of neuroimaging challenges, including identifying variables associated with patient outcomes; understanding an injury’s etiology, development, and progression; creating diagnostic tests; assisting in treatment monitoring; and more. Compared to adults, imaging of the developing brain has attracted less attention from MVA researchers, however, remarkable MVA growth has occurred in recent years. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the literature focusing on MVA technologies applied to brain injury and cancer in neurological fetal, neonatal, and pediatric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With a wide variety of MRI modalities providing physiologically meaningful biomarkers and new biomarker measurements constantly under development, MVA techniques hold enormous potential toward combining available measurements toward improving basic research and the creation of technologies that contribute to improving patient care.
Highlights
Basic functional tasks require the coordination and cooperation of neurons distributed in multiple regions across the brain, all of which are in a state of rapid growth in pre-adult populations
Researchers focused on pre-adult populations face considerable challenges due to brain activity differences between children and adults [1,2,3], the structural changes that many regions undergo during development [4,5,6,7] and the recruitment of large cohorts of age-matched subjects
The results of this systematic review are divided into subsections focusing on brain cancer, stroke, hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, brain injury, encephalopathy, non-neurological conditions that adversely affect the brain, and surgeries with adverse effects on the brain
Summary
Basic functional tasks require the coordination and cooperation of neurons distributed in multiple regions across the brain, all of which are in a state of rapid growth in pre-adult populations. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides a wide variety of physiological/anatomical measurements distributed across a subject’s brain, information that may assist in both clinical applications and in basic research. The most commonly used MRI method produces basic structural information related to the concentration of hydrogen protons, two of which are present in each water molecule. Functional MRI (fMRI) measures a blood oxygen level-dependent signal associated with brain activity and is an important method for monitoring brain function during an assigned task. Spectroscopy involves investigating the effect of small radiofrequency shifts on MR signals acquired, which provides considerable information on the concentration of a variety of molecules present in the tissue
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