Abstract #2003

Testing the Variability of Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI): Inter- & Intra-Site Comparison on Identical 3T Scanners

Alia Lemkaddem¹, Alessandro Daducci¹, Serge Vullimoz², Margitta Seeck², Francois Lazeyras³, Reto Meuli⁴, Gunnar Krueger⁵, Jean-Philippe Thiran¹

¹Signal Processing Laboratories (LTS5), Ecole Polythechnique Fdral de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland; ²Presurgical Epilepsy Evaluation Unit, Hpitaux Universitaires et facult de mdecine de Genve (HUG), Switzerland; ³Department of Radiology, Hpitaux Universitaires et facult de mdecine de Genve (HUG), Switzerland; ⁴Department of Radiology, University Hospital Center & University of Lausanne (CHUV), Switzerland; ⁵Advanced Clinical Imaging Technology, Siemens Medical Solutions-CIBM, Switzerland

The purpose of this study was to evaluate if it was possible to merge DSI data from two different sites. Therefore, we assessed inter- and intra-site reproducibility of two identical 3T scanners at two different hospitals in six healthy subjects. For investigating the reproducibility we used FA, ADC and GFA as measurements of the diffusivity. To validate our results we decided to use three different methodologies: A Tract-based, Regional based and whole brain voxel-based analysis. Our findings support the feasibility of cross-site pooling of DSI data from identical scanners.