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Uncertainty assessment of gamma-aminobutyric acid concentration of different brain regions in individual and group using residual bootstrap analysis

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Abstract

The aim of this work is to quantify individual and regional differences in the relative concentration of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) in human brain with in vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Spectral editing Mescher–Garwood point resolved spectroscopy (MEGA-PRESS) sequence and GABA analysis toolkit (Gannet) were used to detect and quantify GABA in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and occipital cortex (OCC) of healthy volunteers. Residual bootstrap, a model-based statistical analysis technique, was applied to resample the fitting residuals of GABA from the Gaussian fitting model (referred to as GABA+ thereafter) in both individual and group data of ACC and OCC. The inter-subject coefficient of variation (CV) of GABA+ in OCC (20.66 %) and ACC (12.55 %) with residual bootstrap was lower than that of a standard Gaussian model analysis (21.58 % and 16.73 % for OCC and ACC, respectively). The intra-subject uncertainty and CV of OCC were lower than that of ACC in both analyses. The residual bootstrap analysis thus provides a more robust uncertainty estimation of individual and group GABA+ detection in different brain regions, which may be useful in our understanding of GABA biochemistry in brain and its use for the diagnosis of related neuropsychiatric diseases.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 2013QNA5004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Brain Imaging Science and Technology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Biomedical Engineering and Instrument Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Meng Chen, Congyu Liao, Song Chen, Qiuping Ding & Jianhui Zhong

  2. Department of Radiology, Hangzhou First People’s Hospital, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Darong Zhu

  3. MR Collaboration NE Asia, Siemens Healthcare, Shanghai, China

    Hui Liu & Xu Yan

  4. Department of Imaging Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA

    Jianhui Zhong

  5. Center for Innovative and Collaborative Detection and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Jianhui Zhong

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  1. Meng Chen
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  2. Congyu Liao
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  3. Song Chen
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  4. Qiuping Ding
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  5. Darong Zhu
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  6. Hui Liu
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  7. Xu Yan
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Correspondence to Congyu Liao.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Chen, M., Liao, C., Chen, S. et al. Uncertainty assessment of gamma-aminobutyric acid concentration of different brain regions in individual and group using residual bootstrap analysis. Med Biol Eng Comput 55, 1051–1059 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-016-1579-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-016-1579-5

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