Detection of MRI Biomarkers of Golden Retriever Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
Abstract
Golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD) is a spontaneous X-linked canine model of
Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) with the affected animals developing a progressively fatal
disease, similar to the human condition. As a genetically homologous animal model, GRMD has
increasingly been used in natural history studies and studies assessing treatment outcome. There
is a great demand for accurate outcome measures across all disease stages to improve the
understanding of natural history and to facilitate clinical trials. Histology images are widely used
for accurate outcome measures across all disease stages. With a highly invasive method as ground-truth,
a variety of non-invasive methods are frequently assessed to extract information
corresponding to biological characteristics. Due to high soft-tissue contrast images, MRI is
commonly preferred imaging modality to assess GRMD. Spatial correspondence between
histology and MRI is a critical step in the quantitative evaluation of skeletal muscle in GRMD.
Registration becomes technically challenging due to non-orthogonal histology section orientation,
section distortion, and the different image contrast and resolution. This research dissertation
proposed a framework for accurate histology to MRI registration and textural analysis methods to
describe non-invasive MRI biomarkers utilizing multi-sequence MRI images. The experiments
showed that textural features of qualitative and quantitative MRI images can be reliably used for
disease assessments and treatment monitoring.
Citation
Eresen, Aydin (2018). Detection of MRI Biomarkers of Golden Retriever Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A & M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /174043.