The Contribution of Cerebellar White Matter Damage to Cortical Grey Matter: Evidence from Voxel Based Morphometry and Diffusion Imaging

Giusy Olivito¹, ², Michael Dayan³, Marco Molinari¹, Maria Leggio¹, ², Marco Bozzali³

Conventional and diffusion MRI (dMRI) were used to investigate the impact of cerebellar white matter (WM) damage on cerebral grey matter (GM) on a cohort of normal controls (NC) and patients with unilateral cerebellar lesion, in left (LES-L) and right (LES-R) hemisphere. GM voxel based morphometry (VBM) was performed both for LES-L and LES-R groups compared to NC, and for single case study. Both groups and single case analyses demonstrated significant reduction in cerebral GM volume in contralateral and ipsilateral sides, especially in the caudate nucleus. WM VBM was performed for single case analysis and showed dMRI metric changes in both lesioned and contralateral tracts. Our findings support the use of single case analysis for patients with cerebellar lesions and suggest that cortical GM atrophy ispilateral to the lesion is related to dMRI metric changes in contralateral tracts.