Comparison of automated and manual MRI volumetry of hippocampus in normal aging and dementia

✍ Scribed by Yuan-Yu Hsu; Norbert Schuff; An-Tao Du; Kevin Mark; Xiaoping Zhu; Dawn Hardin; Michael W. Weiner

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 157 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1053-1807
• DOI: 10.1002/jmri.10163

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Purpose

To determine whether automatic and manual measurements of hippocampal volume differences on MRI between normal aging, cognitive impairment (CI), and Alzheimer's disease (AD) yield similar results.

Materials and Methods

Reliability was determined for an automatic and a manual method on nine volunteers (22–83 years old) who underwent MRI twice in 1 day. Hippocampal volumes of 20 cognitively normal subjects (mean age 74.0 ± 6.2 years) and age‐matched patients (20 CI and 20 AD) were compared.

Results

The intraclass correlation for automatic calculations of hippocampal volume was 0.94; for manual tracing it was 0.99. Volume differences between cognitively normal, CI, and AD subjects from the automatic and manual methods were similar.

Conclusion

Because the automatic calculations were faster and less susceptible to rater bias than manual tracing, this automated method is expected to be very useful for analyzing hippocampal changes in studies of aging and dementia. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2002;16:305–310. Published 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.