Comparação do complexo amígdalo-hipocampal e do corpo caloso de indivíduos do sexo masculino e feminino por volumetria de imagens de ressonância magnética

Abstract

Anatomic studies have showed the structural difference between male and female human brain, although more detailed information was limited to the impossibility to access those structures in vivo. In this scenario, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been na strong allied to perform structural analysis through volumetry of corpus callosum, amygdala and hippocampus. This work aimed to quantify volumetrically the amygdalo-hippocampal complex (AHC) e o corpus callosum of male and female patients and verify if exist any differences. We used MRI images from healthy adults public avaliabe at the Calgary- Campinas 359 dataset that contained, DICOM images produced on a 3T Siemens scanner where 20 examinations were randomly selected to include 10 male and 10 female patients with the same age. Those images were segmented manually and reconstructed using 3D Slicer (4.10.1) considering anatomic markings and recommendations from Witelson’s protocol for corpus callosum and Watson’s protocol for AHC. Following the quantification step, the data were analyzed using mean value comparison on a dedicated statistics software. Results showed significant difference among the male and female AHC, possibly indicating that the male AHC is larger that the female one. For corpus callosum results, no difference were found. This results indicate that volumetric diferences have no relation to the gender and are mainly influenced by the total cerebral volume.