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Comparison of Manual and Automated Determination of Hippocampal Volumes in MCI and Early AD

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Abstract

MRI-based hippocampal volume analysis has been extensively employed given its potential as a biomarker for brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and accurate and efficient determination of hippocampal volumes from brain images is still a challenging issue. We compared an automated method, FreeSurfer (V4), with a published manual protocol for the determination of hippocampal volumes from T1-weighted MRI scans. Our study included MRI data from 125 older adult subjects: healthy controls with no significant cognitive complaints or deficits (HC, n = 38), euthymic individuals with cognitive complaints (CC, n = 39) but intact neuropsychological performance, and patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 37) or a clinical diagnosis of probable AD (AD, n = 11). Pearson correlations and intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) were calculated to evaluate the relationship between results of the manual tracing and FreeSurfer methods and to estimate their agreement. Results indicated that these two methods derived highly correlated results with strong agreement. After controlling for the age, sex and intracranial volume in statistical group analysis, both the manual tracing and FreeSurfer methods yield similar patterns: both the MCI group and the AD group showed hippocampal volume reduction compared to both the HC group and the CC group, and the HC and CC groups did not differ. These comparisons suggest that FreeSurfer has the potential to be used in automated determination of hippocampal volumes for large-scale MCI/AD-related MRI studies, where manual methods are inefficient or not feasible.

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Acknowledgements

Supported in part by NIA R01 AG19771, NIBIB R03 EB008674-01, NCI R01 CA101318, U54 EB005149 and NIA P30 AG10133 from the NIH, Foundation for the NIH, and grant #87884 from the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC). We thank Nick Schmansky and Bruce Fischl of Harvard Medical School and Randy Heiland of Indiana University for help with running FreeSurfer on IU’s supercomputers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IU Center for Neuroimaging, Division of Imaging Sciences, Department of Radiology, Indiana University School of Medicine, 950 W Walnut St., R2 E124, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Li Shen, Andrew J. Saykin, Sungeun Kim, Hiram A. Firpi, John D. West, Shannon L. Risacher & Brenna C. McDonald

  2. Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Indiana University School of Medicine, 410 West 10th St., Suite 5000, Indianapolis, IN, 46202, USA

    Li Shen

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, DHMC, One Medical Center Dr., Lebanon, NH, 03756, USA

    Andrew J. Saykin, Tara L. McHugh, Heather A. Wishart & Laura A. Flashman

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  1. Li Shen
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  2. Andrew J. Saykin
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  3. Sungeun Kim
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  4. Hiram A. Firpi
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Correspondence to Li Shen.

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Shen, L., Saykin, A.J., Kim, S. et al. Comparison of Manual and Automated Determination of Hippocampal Volumes in MCI and Early AD. Brain Imaging and Behavior 4, 86–95 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-010-9088-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-010-9088-x

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