On May 23th, 9 o’clock A.M, Dr. Wenjing Li passed the Doctoral Dissertation Defense in the conference room on 9th floor of Automation Building. Her thesis topic is ” Investigation of Brain Plasticity in Adolescents with Prelingually Profound Sensorineural Hearing Loss Based on Multimodal MRI”.

Here is the abstract:

Profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) can affect subjects in the development of their language, social skill, and psychology, which reduces the quality of their life. At present, the most effective treatment for SNHL is Cochlear Implantation (CI), but it costs so much and exists risk during the surgery. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the effect of postoperative rehabilitation before the surgery of CI, and investigation to the brain plasticity in subjects with SNHL is an effective way. In this paper, we used multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate both the structural and functional brain plasticity in adolescents with SNHL. The contributions the this dissertation are presented as follows:
(1) We proposed a research scheme to quantativelyevalute the effectiveness of voxel-based morphometry (VBM), including the standard VBM, optimized VBM and VBM-DARTEL (Diffeomorphic Anatomical Registration ThroughExponentiated Lie algebra). We first constructed simulated model to simulate brain atrophies. The results show that VBM-DARTEL is the most robust and effective VBM method to detect structural brain abnormalites when compared with the other two VBM methods. Optimized VBM can provide a more accurate result than standard VBM. Additionally, we used clinical data to investigate structural brain changes, and the results indicate VBM-DARTEL can detect accurate brain changes as well. The results from both the simulated and clinical experiments indicate the robustness of VBM-DARTEL in detecting brain structral changes, which provides valuable methodological instructions when investigating brain structural abnormalities on a voxel level.
(2) We proposed an analytical framework which combined VBM-DARTEL and cortical thickness analyses to simutanousely study changes of brain and its asymmetry in adolescents with SNHL using structural MRI.