MR Volumetry and Schizophrenia: What have we learnt in the past 20 years?

Early brain imaging studies using pneumoencephalography have pointed out as early as in the 1920s and 1950s that there is ventricular enlargement and cortical atrophy in schizophrenia. The introduction of computed tomography in schizophrenia research in 1976 was helpful to support this line of evidence. Since then magnetic resonance imaging has helped considerably to establish schizophrenia as being a brain disorder. Structural brain imaging studies have helped to identify that there is a subtle loss of the whole brain volume in schizophrenia, an enlargement of the ventricular system, especially the lateral vent…