A comparison between voxel-based cortical thickness and voxel-based morphometry in normal aging

By Chloe Hutton, Bogdan Draganski, John Ashburner, Nikolaus Weiskopf. NeuroImage, 2009

590 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The morphology of cortical grey matter is commonly assessed using T1-weighted MRI together with automated computerised methods such as voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and cortical thickness measures. In the presented study we investigate how grey matter changes identified using voxel-based cortical thickness (VBCT) measures compare with local grey matter volume changes identified using VBM. We use data from a healthy aging population to perform the comparison, focusing on brain regions where age-related changes have been observed in previous studies. Our results show that overall, in healthy aging, VBCT and VBM yield very consistent results but VBCT provides a more sensitive measure of age-associated decline in grey matter compared with VBM. Our findings suggest that while VBCT selectively investigates cortical thickness, VBM provides a mixed measure of grey matter including cortical surface area or cortical folding, as well as cortical thickness. We therefore propose that used together, these techniques can separate the underlying grey matter changes, highlighting the utility of combining these complementary methods.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a208120fde3a76397c612ca55e6fe6ca8032025a

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Citations in the corpus

Report Human Parietal Cortex Structure Predicts Individual Differences in Perceptual Rivalry (2010, methodology): “The differences between cortical thickness and GM density analyses could be due to a number of factors such as measurement of different aspects of GM structure [16].”
CAT: a computational anatomy toolbox for the analysis of structural MRI data (2024, background): “Furthermore, the comparable pattern across measures suggests a considerable consistency between av ailable mor phometric options, e v en if gr ay matter volume and cortical thickness are biologically different and not per-fectl y r elated [ 49 , 50 ].”
Unique developmental trajectories of cortical thickness and surface area (2014, background): “…(affine registration), segmentation of subcortical white matter, deep gray matter structures and cerebellar structures (Fischl et al., 2004a,b; Hutton et al., 2009; Salat, 2004), intensity normalization (Sled et al., 1998); tessellation of graywhitematter boundary automated topology…”
Cortical thickness and central surface estimation (2013, methodology): “Furthermore, PBT allows a direct voxel-based analysis, potentially in combination with other voxel-based data (Hutton et al., 2009), and it may also be used to measure the thickness of the WM and CSF [HBM2010].”
Regional specificity of MRI contrast parameter changes in normal ageing revealed by voxel-based quantification (VBQ) (2011, background): “Received 8 July 2010 Revised 17 January 2011 Accepted 20 January 2011 Available online 28 January 2011”