Houshang Amiri 1, Antoine Meijerman1, Martijn D. Steenwijk1,2, Ronald A. van Schijndel3, Frederik Barkhof2,3, Keith S. Cover1, and Hugo Vrenken1,2
1Department of Physics and Medical Technology, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 3Image Analysis Center, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Interest in measuring brain atrophy in neurodegenerative diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is growing. To this end, FreeSurfer and FSL-FIRST are widely used as fully automated algorithms for quantification of the brain volume and volume change in both cross-sectional and longitudinal MRI studies. We have tested reproducibility of these methods in measuring deep gray matter atrophy rates in a group of subjects consisting of healthy aging, mild cognitive impairment and AD. We showed that using longitudinal mode for FreeSurfer and highest number of modes for FIRST provides the best reproducibility that is similar for FreeSurfer and FIRST.
