Voxel-based morphometry

Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is like taking very detailed pictures of your brain and looking at them to see if there are any differences between people's brains.

Imagine your brain is a big city that is made up of little building blocks called voxels. These voxels are like the tiny bricks that make up a house. VBM looks at each of these voxels in your brain and measures how much gray matter and white matter is there. Gray matter is like the rooms in your house where your brain does all the thinking, and white matter is like the roads that connect those rooms.

VBM can tell us if there are differences in the amount of gray matter or white matter in different parts of the brain. For example, it can show us if people with certain diseases, like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, have less gray matter in certain areas of their brains. It can also show us if people who have experienced trauma or have certain genetic differences have more or less gray or white matter in certain parts of their brains.

So, VBM is like taking a really detailed picture of your brain and looking at each little building block to see how much gray and white matter is there. This helps scientists understand how the brain works and how it is affected by different conditions.