Affiliations 

  • 1 Faculty of Psychology & Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Sabah, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Physiology, School of Medical Sciences, Health Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 16150 Kubang Kerian, Kelantan, Malaysia
  • 3 Department of Paediatrics, School of Medical Sciences, Health Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 16150 Kubang Kerian, Kelantan, Malaysia
  • 4 School of Health Sciences, Health Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 16150 Kubang Kerian, Kelantan, Malaysia
  • 5 Department of Dentistry, School of Dentistry, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan
Malays J Med Sci, 2018 Sep;25(5):68-78.
PMID: 30914864 MyJurnal DOI: 10.21315/mjms2018.25.5.7

Abstract

Background: Neuroimaging is increasingly used to locate the lesion that causes cerebral palsy (CP) and its extent in the brains of CP patients. Conventional structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not indicate the connectional pattern of white matter; however, with the help of diffusion MRI, fibre tracking of white matter can be done.

Methods: We used diffusion MRI and probabilistic tractography to identify the putative white matter connectivity in the brains of 10 CP patients. We tracked the corticospinal tract (CST) of the patients' upper and lower limbs and calculated the white matter connectivity, as indexed by streamlines representing the probability of connection of the CST.

Results: Our results show that diffusion MRI with probabilistic tractography, while having some relation with the clinical diagnosis of CP, reveals a high degree of individual variation in the streamlines representing the CST for upper and lower limbs.

Conclusion: Diffusion MRI with probabilistic tractography provides the state of connectivity from lesioned areas to other parts of the brain and is potentially beneficial to be used as an adjunct to the clinical management of CP, providing a means to monitor intervention outcomes.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.