Anatomical comparison between Gilles de la Tourette syndrome patients and control subjects based on the framework of currents

The atlas construction method shown for the first time in the paper of Durrleman et al. and tested only on surfaces was successfully implemented also for fiber bundles modeled as 3D curves. We used this method on a dataset constituted by cortical surfaces, subcortical structures and fiber bundles (all represented by mathematical objects called “currents”) belonging to 27 controls and 47 patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS). The goal of this Master’s Thesis was to check the hypothesis presented in Worbe et al. which correlates GTS with the shapes of the anatomical objects constituting the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuits. Given a population, we built a template (an average shape) for each kind of object considering all the subjects and we analyzed also the deformations of this template to each object in order to characterize its variability within the population. We compared the templates of each population and also their deformations showing the most different parts between the two populations. These areas can drive a deeper research for GTS biomarkers