Karl Gerard Helmer1, Ming-Chung Chou2,
Allen Song3, Jessica Turner4, Barjor Gimi5,
Susumu Mori6
1Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital,
Charlestown, MA, United States; 2Department of Computer Science
and Engineering, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; 3Duke
University, Durham, NC, United States; 4University of California,
Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States; 5UT Southwestern Medical Center
at Dallas, Dallas, TX, United States; 6Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, United States
The
addition of diffusion tensor imaging to the protocol of multi-site studies has
become more common in recent years.
However, few studies have been performed on the reproducibility of
tensor metrics across site and scanner manufacturer. We present data using scanners from
Siemens, Philips, and GE and look at the behavior of the fractional
anisotropy as decreasing amounts of data and/or diffusion-weighted directions
are used in the tensor calculation.
The methods used in this study are also suitable for the
site-reliability characterization before a multi-site study is begun or after
upgrades during the study.