Beware of white matter hyperintensities causing systematic errors in FreeSurfer gray matter segmentations!
Hum Brain Mapp
; 42(9): 2734-2745, 2021 06 15.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33783933
ABSTRACT
Volumetric estimates of subcortical and cortical structures, extracted from T1-weighted MRIs, are widely used in many clinical and research applications. Here, we investigate the impact of the presence of white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) on FreeSurfer gray matter (GM) structure volumes and its possible bias on functional relationships. T1-weighted images from 1,077 participants (4,321 timepoints) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative were processed with FreeSurfer version 6.0.0. WMHs were segmented using a previously validated algorithm on either T2-weighted or Fluid-attenuated inversion recovery images. Mixed-effects models were used to assess the relationships between overlapping WMHs and GM structure volumes and overall WMH burden, as well as to investigate whether such overlaps impact associations with age, diagnosis, and cognitive performance. Participants with higher WMH volumes had higher overlaps with GM volumes of bilateral caudate, cerebral cortex, putamen, thalamus, pallidum, and accumbens areas (p < .0001). When not corrected for WMHs, caudate volumes increased with age (p < .0001) and were not different between cognitively healthy individuals and age-matched probable Alzheimer's disease patients. After correcting for WMHs, caudate volumes decreased with age (p < .0001), and Alzheimer's disease patients had lower caudate volumes than cognitively healthy individuals (p < .01). Uncorrected caudate volume was not associated with ADAS13 scores, whereas corrected lower caudate volumes were significantly associated with poorer cognitive performance (p < .0001). Presence of WMHs leads to systematic inaccuracies in GM segmentations, particularly for the caudate, which can also change clinical associations. While specifically measured for the Freesurfer toolkit, this problem likely affects other algorithms.
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Texto completo:
1
Coleções:
01-internacional
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Imageamento por Ressonância Magnética
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Interpretação de Imagem Assistida por Computador
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Leucoaraiose
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Doença de Alzheimer
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Neuroimagem
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Substância Cinzenta
Tipo de estudo:
Observational_studies
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Prognostic_studies
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Risk_factors_studies
Limite:
Aged
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Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Hum Brain Mapp
Assunto da revista:
CEREBRO
Ano de publicação:
2021
Tipo de documento:
Article
País de afiliação:
Canadá