MRI-derived measurements of human subcortical, ventricular and intracranial brain volumes: Reliability effects of scan sessions, acquisition sequences, data analyses, scanner upgrade, scanner…

By Jorge Jovicich, S. Czanner, Xiao Han, David H. Salat, A. V. D. van der Kouwe, Brian T. Quinn, J. Pacheco, Marilyn S. Albert, R. Killiany, Deborah Blacker and 7 more. NeuroImage, 2009

579 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Automated MRI-derived measurements of in-vivo human brain volumes provide novel insights into normal and abnormal neuroanatomy, but little is known about measurement reliability. Here we assess the impact of image acquisition variables (scan session, MRI sequence, scanner upgrade, vendor and field strengths), Freesurfer segmentation preprocessing variables (image averaging, B1 field inhomogeneity correction) and segmentation analysis variables (probabilistic atlas) on resultant image segmentation volumes from older (n=15, mean age 69.5) and younger (both n=5, mean ages 34 and 36.5) healthy subjects. The variability between hippocampal, thalamic, caudate, putamen, lateral ventricular and total intracranial volume measures across sessions on the same scanner on different days is less than 4.3% for the older group and less than 2.3% for the younger group. Within-scanner measurements are remarkably reliable across scan sessions, being minimally affected by averaging of multiple acquisitions, B1 correction, acquisition sequence (MPRAGE vs. multi-echo-FLASH), major scanner upgrades (Sonata-Avanto, Trio-TrioTIM), and segmentation atlas (MPRAGE or multi-echo-FLASH). Volume measurements across platforms (Siemens Sonata vs. GE Signa) and field strengths (1.5T vs. 3T) result in a volume difference bias but with a comparable variance as that measured within-scanner, implying that multi-site studies may not necessarily require a much larger sample to detect a specific effect. These results suggest that volumes derived from automated segmentation of T1-weighted structural images are reliable measures within the same scanner platform, even after upgrades; however, combining data across platform and across field-strength introduces a bias that should be considered in the design of multi-site studies, such as clinical drug trials. The results derived from the young groups (scanner upgrade effects and B1 inhomogeneity correction effects) should be considered as preliminary and in need for further validation with a larger dataset.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00db650b8714e2904e4099e73553e9bb40143d0f

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Citations in the corpus

The Effects of FreeSurfer Version, Workstation Type, and Macintosh Operating System Version on Anatomical Volume and Cortical Thickness Measurements (2012, background): “Some of these studies addressed the effect of scanner-specific parameters, including field strength, pulse sequence, scanner upgrade, and vendor (cortical thickness: [9,10]; volume: [11]).”
Effects of memory training on cortical thickness in the elderly (2010, methodology): “TBV was estimated by a validated (Jovicich et al., 2009) automated procedure for volumetric measures of different brain structures provided in FreeSurfer.”
Multi-Parametric Neuroimaging Reproducibility: A 3T Resource Study (2010, background): “• MPRAGE acquisitions are typically exploited for volumetric analyses (Jovicich et al., 2009; Kochunov and Duff Davis, 2010) of structures of interest.”
ISLES 2015 - A public evaluation benchmark for ischemic stroke lesion segmentation from multispectral MRI (2016, background): “conclusive picture as the observed high variations might equally 691 be caused by the considerably smaller lesion sizes in the second 692 center dataset or other factors not attributable to multi-center 693 variations (Jovicich et al., 2009).”