過往研究中發現，人類的大腦皮質，隨著發育和老化，以及病理改變，皮質厚度會在相應的區域呈現明顯的變化。而由於磁共振造影技術的進步，商用儀器得以用無侵入的方式取得人類大腦的高解析度T1權重影像，經過電腦運算後，則能夠取得皮質厚度於大腦內的分佈情形。然而對於臨床研究者而言，進行相關的計算，需要克服幾個困難點。一、操作流程複雜，學習門檻高。二、特殊軟硬體環境的需求。三、運算時間長。為了解決這個問題，本研究提出了一個以雲端計算服務為架構之大腦皮質厚度量測系統。本研究除了對開發出的系統進行效能評估之外，也實際進行兩項實際應用。一、利用磁振造影來量測腦部分區皮質厚度之重現性分析。二、使用注意力缺陷與過動症(ADHD)之實際病例，透過本系統進行皮質厚度分析，並與相關文獻指出的結果互相比對。本研究結果顯示以雲端系統來進行大腦皮質厚度量測的確實可行，大幅地簡化相關研究資料處理流程。

Previous investigations indicate that human cerebral cortex thickness alter with maturing, aging, and pathology. As MRI technique advances, recent studies show that brain cortical thickness measurement can be achieved by non-invasive MRI high-resolution T1-weighted imaging and sophisticated computer processing. However, clinical researchers who attempt to utilize this technique have to pass through several barriers before they can perform studies related to cortical thickness. The barriers include sophisticated user-interface of the current available software, specific software and hardware environment, and long computation time. To solve this problem, this study proposed a cloud-computing system for brain cortical thickness measurement. In this study, we implemented the computing system and evaluated its performance. In addition, we perform cortical thickness analysis on two data sets. One is a reproducibility study of MRI-based cortical thickness measurement. The other is a ADHD patient dataset. The results indicate that the system is applicable and the analysis results are consistent with the previous investigations. We conclude that the proposed cloud-based system facilitating the analysis procedure of brain cortical thickness measurement. It could be a practical tool for clinical researchers.

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