| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 電機工程學系研究所 === 106 === Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which leads to impairment in social communication and specific behavior repertoire. In general, neuroimaging studies support the concept that regional abnormalities of the cerebral cortical thickness are associated with autism, while results from volumetric studies done on hippocampus and amygdala are inconsistent. The purpose of this study is to measure the results of local experiments that exclude factors such as gender, patient''s siblings that might affect the results. In this study, the cortical thickness and volumes of hippocampus and amygdala were obtained by using a surface-based method (FreeSurfer) on 17 adolescents diagnosed with ASD (mean age=17.15±1.13 years old) and 10 age-matched typically developing controls (mean age=16.68±1.77 years old). The results revealed that the ASD adolescents have thicker cortical thickness on the temporal and occipital lobes and scattered thinner thickness in cingulate. In addition, a statistically significant increase of right hippocampal absolute volume is found in adolescents with ASD but becomes non-significant after normalization to individual’s intracranial volume. The finding of this study corroborates to several previous literatures, but also somewhat inconsistent with reports by others. However, there is no absolute cause-effect relationship or diagnostic value between brain structures and ASD. Besides, there are no consistent conclusions about structural changes in development at present.
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