Quantifying brain atrophy in clinical practice for MS patients: a feasibility study on the measurement error

This poster is published under an open license. Please read the disclaimer for further details.

Congress:

ECR 2015

Poster Number:

C-2223

Type:

Scientific Exhibit

Keywords:

Neuroradiology brain, MR, Segmentation, Computer Applications-Detection, diagnosis, Technology assessment

Authors:

A. Ribbens¹, M. Cambron², J. De Keyser², A.-M. Van Binst², J. de Mey³, S. Jain¹, G. Nagels², A. Maertens¹, W. Van Hecke¹; ¹Leuven/BE, ²Brussel/BE, ³Brussels/BE

DOI:

10.1594/ecr2015/C-2223

DOI-Link:

https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/ecr2015/C-2223

Fig. 1: The average brain atrophy for healthy subjects on the left compared to the...

Fig. 2: Definition of the measurement error. 9 MS patients are scanned two times on 3...

Fig. 3: Grey matter en white matter segmentation of all scans for one patient on the...

Fig. 4: Measurement error of the whole brain (WB) and grey matter (GM) volume for three...

Aims and objectives

Classically multiple sclerosis (MS) has been regarded as an auto-immune disease. However, it is now known that brain atrophy plays an important role in MS. As the typical brain atrophy rate in MS patients is around 0.7-1% and in healthy subjects around 0.1-0.3% [1-2], the measurement error of brain atrophy measures should be very small. In this context, the brain atrophy measurement error was evaluated for different software packages in this study.

Methods and materials

9 MS patients were scanned on the same day on a 3T Siemens, 3T Philips and 3T GE scanner. For each scanner, a 3D T1 and a 3D FLAIR was acquired. Subsequently, the patient was removed from the scanner and a 3D T1 and a 3D FLAIR was acquired again. As no atrophy is expected during one day, these data sets can be used to evaluate the atrophy measurement error. The atrophy measurement error of three following software pipelines was evaluated: SIENA (FSL) (based on...

Results

The within scanner median percentage error was calculated for the whole brain atrophy and for grey matter atrophy. The providedmeasurement error is averaged out over all three 3T scanners from different vendors. MSmetrix has an median error of 0.13%, SIENA of 0.34% and Freesurfer of 0.96% for the whole brain atrophy. The within scanner median percentage error for the grey matter atrophy measurement was 0.19% for MSmetrix and 1.06% for Freesurfer. SIENA does not provide agrey matter atrophy measurement as the method is based on...

Conclusion

A low measurement error is needed to use brain atrophy to follow-up MS patients in clinical practice. Our results demonstrate that MSmetrix has a very low and acceptable test-retest measurement error and that the registration based methods (SIENA, MSmetrix) outperform the segmentation-based approach (Freesurfer).

Personal information

References

[1] Filippi M., Agosto F.. "Imaging Biomarkers in Multiple Sclerosis", Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging31, 770–788, 2010. [2] Fisher E., Lee J.-C., Nakamura K., Rudick R.A.. "Gray Matter Atrophy in Multiple Sclerosis: A Longitudinal Study". Annals of Neurology 64, 255–265, 2008. [3] Smith M., Zhang Y., Jenkinson M., Chen J., Matthews P.M., Federico A., De Stefano N.. "Accurate, robust and automated longitudinal and cross-sectional brain change analysis." NeuroImage, 17, 479-489, 2002. [4] Jain S.,Smeets D., Sima D.M., Ribbens A., Janssens K., Daams M., Steenwijk M.,...