• Venkateswaran Rajagopalan, Guang H Yue, and Erik P Pioro.
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, ND2, Lerner Research Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, USA; Human Performance and Engineering Laboratory, Kessler Foundation Research Center, West Orange, New Jersey, USA.
• J Magn Reson Imaging. 2014 Sep 1; 40 (3): 662-7.

PurposeTo study whether inconsistent findings in voxel-based morphometry (VBM) in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) brain are due to use of different data preprocessing and statistical methods in two software packages.Materials And MethodsT1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was obtained during routine clinical imaging at 1.5T in ALS patients with frontotemporal dementia (ALS-FTD) (n=18) and in unaffected neurologic controls (n=15). Gray matter (GM) VBM analysis was carried out using FMRIB software library (FSL) 4.1.5 and statistical parametric mapping 8 (SPM8). Comparison of processing steps segmentation, registration, and statistical methods (nonparametric vs. parametric) between the two softwares was performed by subjecting the same dataset through standard VBM processing pipelines.ResultsGM volume was significantly (P<0.05) reduced in motor and extramotor regions of ALS-FTD when compared to controls. Percentage of atrophied GM voxels in the entire brain that reached statistical significance using FSL was 22.52% compared to 0.81% in SPM. Similarly, 0.81% (3308 voxels) reached statistical significance using nonparametric statistics when compared to parametric statistics (0.50%, 2056 voxels).ConclusionThe differences in GM volume atrophy measures found by FSL and SPM analytic methods indicate that variable results in previous VBM studies may arise from differences in their image processing algorithms and statistical models.© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

20 keywords...

hide…