• Hernán Chaves, Francisco Dorr, Martín Elías Costa, María Mercedes Serra, Diego Fernández Slezak, Mauricio F Farez, Gustavo Sevlever, Paulina Yañez, and Claudia Cejas.
• Diagnostic Imaging Department, Fleni, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Entelai, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Electronic address: hchaves@fleni.org.ar.
• J Neuroradiology. 2021 May 1; 48 (3): 147-156.

Background And PurposeThere are instances in which an estimate of the brain volume should be obtained from MRI in clinical practice. Our objective is to calculate cross-sectional robustness of a convolutional neural network (CNN) based software (Entelai Pic) for brain volume estimation and compare it to traditional software such as FreeSurfer, CAT12 and FSL in healthy controls (HC).Materials And MethodsSixteen HC were scanned four times, two different days on two different MRI scanners (1.5 T and 3 T). Volumetric T1-weighted images were acquired and post-processed with FreeSurfer v6.0.0, Entelai Pic v2, CAT12 v12.5 and FSL v5.0.9. Whole-brain, grey matter (GM), white matter (WM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volumes were calculated. Correlation and agreement between methods was assessed using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and Bland Altman plots. Robustness was assessed using the coefficient of variation (CV).ResultsWhole-brain volume estimation had better correlation between FreeSurfer and Entelai Pic (ICC (95% CI) 0.96 (0.94-0.97)) than FreeSurfer and CAT12 (0.92 (0.88-0.96)) and FSL (0.87 (0.79-0.91)). WM, GM and CSF showed a similar trend. Compared to FreeSurfer, Entelai Pic provided similarly robust segmentations of brain volumes both on same-scanner (mean CV 1.07, range 0.20-3.13% vs. mean CV 1.05, range 0.21-3.20%, p = 0.86) and on different-scanner variables (mean CV 3.84, range 2.49-5.91% vs. mean CV 3.84, range 2.62-5.13%, p = 0.96). Mean post-processing times were 480, 5, 40 and 5 min for FreeSurfer, Entelai Pic, CAT12 and FSL respectively.ConclusionBased on robustness and processing times, our CNN-based model is suitable for cross-sectional volumetry on clinical practice.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

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