Subject‐Level Segmentation Precision Weights for Volumetric Studies Involving Label Fusion
In neuroimaging research, volumetric data contribute valuable information for understanding brain changes during both healthy aging and pathological processes. Extracting these measures from images requires segmenting the regions of interest (ROIs), and many popular methods accomplish this by fusing labels from multiple expert-segmented images called atlases. However, post-segmentation, current practices typically treat each subject's measurement equally without incorporating any information about variation in their segmentation precision. This naïve approach hinders comparing ROI volumes between different samples to identify associations between tissue volume and disease or phenotype. We propose a novel method that estimates the variance of the measured ROI volume for each subject due to the multi-atlas segmentation procedure. We demonstrate in real data that weighting by these estimates markedly improves the power to detect a mean difference in hippocampal volume between controls and subjects with mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer's disease.
Authors
- Fengling Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1081-5038)
- Russell Taki Shinohara (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8627-8203)
- David A. Wolk (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3554-3481)
- Andrew A. Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5027-6422)
- Sandhitsu R. Das (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0530-2887)
- Paul A. Yushkevich (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8543-4016)
- C.W. Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5145-4625)
- M. Dylan Tisdall (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0454-3112)
Institutions
- Medical University of South Carolina (US)
- Penn Center for AIDS Research (US)
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Human Brain Mapping
- Published
- 2024-12-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70082
- Primary Topic
- Medical Image Segmentation Techniques
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- U.S. Department of Defense
- Alzheimer's Association
- Bristol-Myers Squibb
- Eli Lilly and Company
- Pfizer
- Biogen
- University of Southern California
- Meso Scale Diagnostics
- Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
- BioClinica
- Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation
- Northern California Institute for Research and Education
- Eisai
- Servier
- H. Lundbeck A/S
- IXICO
- National Institutes of Health
- Genentech
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research
- National Institute on Aging
- National Institute of Mental Health
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences
- National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke