Inter-hemispheric atrophy better correlates with expert ratings than hemispheric cortical atrophy, İnterhemi̇sferi̇k atrofi̇ ölçümleri̇ hemi̇sferi̇k korti̇kal atrofi̇ ölçümleri̇ i̇le karşilaştirildiǧinda uzman derecelendi̇ rmesi̇ i̇le daha uyumludur

Abstract

Brain atrophy is one of the parameters considered by experts for rating dementia from neuro-imaging findings. Research efforts have focused on measuring brain atrophy from images through experts' visual assessment or computer-based approaches. However, agreement between the visual assessment and computer-based measurement of atrophy is not yet investigated. Accordingly, this paper presents an automated method for cerebral atrophy assessment from cross-sectional MRI through hemispheric volume loss. For this purpose, the proposed method quantifies inter-hemispheric distance, and the distance between the cranium and the brain parenchyma, separately. Discriminative power of the proposed method is evaluated on two datasets with experts' visual gradings: Yue et al.'s data and a newly created reference dataset. Results show that inter-hemispheric atrophy better correlates with visual grades, and inconsistencies at the skull-stripping or brain tissue extraction steps can degrade the agreement between computer-based measurements and expert gradings. © 2012 IEEE. © 2013 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.