About Our Company
Brain Image Analysis is a small business operated specifically to provide services to researchers who have need for brain morphology measures. Our research is focused on developing and implementing methods to measure what you need. If we don't already have procedures to meet those needs, accurately and efficiently, we are likely already working on them.
Our Motivation
Brain
Image Analysis was founded in 2010 by Ronald Pierson. He
worked in imaging at the University of Iowa for 12 years, most
recently as the Administrative Chair of Imaging for PREDICT-HD, a 32
site, 1,000+ participant, international study of prodromal
Huntington disease. Ten of those years were spent working with
Nancy Andreasen on the Iowa Longitudinal Study of
Schizophrenia, an imaging study that has followed participants for
two decades and has investigated many issues, including recent
findings on the effects
of antipsychotics on brain morphology. During this time he formed
collaborations with numerous researchers from around the world who
had unmet needs for good brain morphology measures. Too often
researchers had unsatisfactory or incomplete brain measures to
address their research questions even after they had set up the
tools, trained their staff and invested large proportions of their
budgets and years of effort. They were
reinventing the same wheel, running into the same issues, and
looking for the same solutions. This company was created to
assist researchers with those imaging needs, freeing up their time,
effort and precious research funds to address more pressing aspects
of their research.
Previous Work
Listed below are some of the publications that the founder has been involved in, either in his work at the University of Iowa or through outside affiliations. They are a short list of the hundreds of publications based on BRAINS-processed data.
Ho BC, Andreasen NC, Ziebell S, Pierson R, Magnotta V. Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes: A Longitudinal Study of First-Episode Schizophrenia. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2011 Feb;68(2):128-37.
Pierson RK, Johnson H, Harris G, Keefe HL, Paulsen JS, Andreasen NC, Magnotta VA. Fully automated analysis using BRAINS: AutoWorkup. Neuroimage. 2011 Jan 1;54(1):328-36.
Oyegbile TO, Bayless K, Dabbs K, Jones J, Rutecki P, Pierson R, Seidenberg M, Hermann B. The nature and extent of cerebellar atrophy in chronic temporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsia. 2011 Jan 26
Nopoulos PC, Aylward EH, Ross CA, Mills JA, Langbehn DR, Johnson HJ, Magnotta VA, Pierson RK, Beglinger LJ, Nance MA, Barker RA, Paulsen JS; PREDICT-HD Investigators and Coordinators of the Huntington Study Group. Smaller intracranial volume in prodromal Huntington's disease: evidence for abnormal neurodevelopment. Brain. 2011 Jan;134(Pt 1):137-42.
Nopoulos PC, Aylward EH, Ross CA, Johnson HJ, Magnotta VA, Juhl AR, Pierson RK, Mills J, Langbehn DR, Paulsen JS; PREDICT-HD Investigators Coordinators of Huntington Study Group (HSG). Cerebral cortex structure in prodromal Huntington disease. Neurobiol Dis. 2010 Dec;40(3):544-54.
Aylward EH, Nopoulos PC, Ross CA, Langbehn DR, Pierson RK, Mills JA, Johnson HJ, Magnotta VA, Juhl AR, Paulsen JS; the PREDICT-HD Investigators and Coordinators of the Huntington Study Group. Longitudinal change in regional brain volumes in prodromal Huntington disease. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry. 2010 Sep 30.
Paulsen JS, Nopoulos PC, Aylward E, Ross CA, Johnson H, Magnotta VA, Juhl A, Pierson RK, Mills J, Langbehn D, Nance M; PREDICT-HD Investigators and Coordinators of the Huntington's Study Group (HSG). Striatal and white matter predictors of estimated diagnosis for Huntington disease. Brain Res Bull. 2010 May 31;82(3-4):201-7.
Tiemeier H, Lenroot RK, Greenstein DK, Tran L, Pierson R, Giedd JN. Cerebellum development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal morphometric MRI study. Neuroimage. 2010 Jan 1;49(1):63-70. Epub 2009 Aug 13.
Bauer PM, Hanson JL, Pierson RK, Davidson RJ, Pollak SD. Cerebellar volume and cognitive functioning in children who experienced early deprivation. Biol Psychiatry. 2009 Dec 15;66(12):1100-6. Epub 2009 Aug 5.
Pierson, R., Harris, G., Johnson, H., Dunn, S., Magnotta, V., 2009. Maximize uniformity summation heuristic (MUSH): a highly accurate simple method for intracranial delineation. In: Pluim, J., Dawant, B. (Eds.), Medical Imaging 2009: Image Processing. SPIE, Bellingham, WA
Andreasen NC, Pierson RK, The Role of the Cerebellum in Schizophrenia. Biol Psychiatry. 2008 Jul 15;64(2):81-8..
Powell S, Magnotta VA, Johnson H, Jammalamadak V, Pierson RK, Andreasen NC. Registration and machine learning-based automated segmentation of subcortical and cerebellar brain structures. Neuroimage. 2008 Jan 1;39(1):238-47.
McCormick, LM, Boles Ponto LL, Pierson RK, Johnson HJ, Magnotta VA. Metabolic Correlates of Antidepressant and Antipsychotic Response in Patients with Psychotic Depression Undergoing ECT. J ECT. 2007 Dec;23(4):265-73.
Mackie S, Shaw P, Lenroot R, Pierson R, Greenstein DK, Nugent TF 3rd, Sharp WS, Giedd JN, Rapoport JL. Cerebellar development and clinical outcome in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Am J Psychiatry. 2007 Apr;164(4):647-55.
Marvel CL, Turner BM, O’Leary DS, Johnson HJ, Pierson RK, Boles Ponto LL, Andreasen NC, The Neural Correlates of Implicit Sequence Learning in Schizophrenia. Neuropsychology. 2007 Nov;21(6):761-77.
Turner BM, Paradiso S, Marvel CL, Pierson RK, Boles Ponto LL, Hichwa R, Robinson R. The Cerebellum and Emotional Experience. Neuropsychologia. 2007 Mar 25;45(6):1331-41
Pierson RK, Westmoreland-Corson P, Sears LL, Alicata D, Magnotta VA, O’Leary DS, Andreasen NC. Manual and semiautomated measurement of cerebellar subregions on MR images. 2002. Neuroimage 17(1):61-76. (Including cover art)
Okugawa G, Sedvall G, Nordstrom M, Andreasen N, Pierson R, Magnotta V, Agartz I. Selective reduction of the posterior superior vermis in men with chronic schizophrenia. 2002. Schizophr Res. 55(1-2):61-67
Ward J, Magnotta VA, Andreasen NC, Ooteman W, Nopoulos PC, Pierson RK. Color enhancement of multispectral magnetic resonance images: Improving the visualization of subcortical structures. 2001, J Comput Assist Tomogr. 25(6):942-949.