Reproducibility and Reliability of Computing Models in Segmentation and Volumetric Measurement of Brain

• Published in: Annals of Neurosciences Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 224 - 229
• Main Author: Singh, Mahender Kumar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New Delhi, India SAGE Publications 01.10.2023
• Subjects: FSL-FAST; Brain segmentation; CAT12; ANTs; morphometry; FreeSurfer
• ISSN: 0972-7531; 0976-3260
• DOI: 10.1177/09727531231159959

Background Segmentation and morphometric measurement of brain tissue and regions from non-invasive magnetic resonance images have clinical and research applications. Several software tools and models have been developed by different research groups which are increasingly used for segmentation and morphometric measurements. Variability in results has been observed in the imaging data processed with different neuroimaging pipelines which have increased the focus on standardization. Purpose The availability of several tools and models for brain morphometry poses challenges as an analysis done on the same set of data using different sets of tools and pipelines may result in different results and interpretations and there is a need for understanding the reliability and accuracy of such models. Methods T1-weighted (T1-w) brain volumes from the publicly available OASIS3 dataset have been analysed using recent versions of FreeSurfer, FSL-FAST, CAT12, and ANTs pipelines. grey matter (GM), white matter (WM), and estimated total intracranial volume (eTIV) have been extracted and compared for inter-method variability and accuracy. Results All four methods are consistent and strongly reproducible in their measurement across subjects however there is a significant degree of variability between these methods. Conclusion CAT12 and FreeSurfer methods have the highest degree of agreement in tissue class segmentation and are most reproducible compared to others.