Assessing age-related gray matter decline with voxel-based morphometry depends significantly on segmentation and normalization procedures.

ABSTRACT: Healthy ageing coincides with a progressive decline of brain gray matter (GM) ultimately affecting the entire brain. For a long time, manual delineation-based volumetry within predefined regions of interest (ROI) has been the gold standard for assessing such degeneration. Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) offers an automated alternative approach that, however, relies critically on the segmentation and spatial normalization of a large collection of images from different subjects. This can be achieved via different algorithms, with SPM5/SPM8, DARTEL of SPM8 and FSL tools (FAST, FNIRT) being three of the most frequently used. We complemented these voxel based measurements with a ROI based approach, whereby the ROIs are defined by transforms of an atlas (containing different tissue probability map

SUBMITTER: Callaert DV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4066859 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature