Comparing SPM12 and CAT12 segmentation pipelines: a brain tissue volume-based age and Alzheimer's disease study

Vânia Tavares; Diana Prata; Hugo Alexandre Ferreira

doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2019.108565

Comparing SPM12 and CAT12 segmentation pipelines: a brain tissue volume-based age and Alzheimer's disease study

J Neurosci Methods. 2019 Dec 27:334:108565. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2019.108565. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Vânia Tavares¹, Diana Prata², Hugo Alexandre Ferreira³

Affiliations

¹ Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. Electronic address: vstavares@fc.ul.pt.
² Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIS-IUL, Lisboa, Portugal; Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London, UK.
³ Instituto de Biofísica e Engenharia Biomédica, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.

PMID: 31887318
DOI: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2019.108565

Abstract

Background: Brain volumes have been used as research biomarkers both in health and in Alzheimer's disease(AD). In order to improve the comparability between studies and aid future analytical software platform choice in the research setting, here we compare two segmentation pipelines of structural brain magnetic resonance imaging(sMRI): the SPM12 toolbox, and a SPM12 add-on, the CAT12 toolbox.

Methods: We segmented 1.5T and 3T T1-weighted sMRI images (from the OASIS-brain database) using both pipelines and compared them in terms of their impact on: 1)the effect of age on the total grey matter(GM) and white matter(WM), and on the hippocampi GM volumes in a healthy sample(n = 238); 2)the effect of AD diagnosis on the same volume measures; and 3)the accuracy of each volume measure detecting diagnosis (100 patients with AD and 78 age- and gender-matched healthy subjects).

Results and comparison between methods: Our results demonstrated that: 1)volume estimates from SPM12 were highly correlated with the ones from CAT12, albeit absolute differences between pipelines were tissue specific; 2)the choice of pipeline modulated the effect of age on all volume measures and of diagnosis on hippocampi GM volumes computed from 3 T data; and 3)pipeline had no impact on the accuracy of any brain volume measure detecting AD diagnosis.

Conclusions: Our findings indicate that other studies should take these pipeline effects on age and AD diagnosis, into account, for improved comparability in previous literature. Additionally, we encourage future studies to use CAT12 as this is a more advanced and computationally efficient brain segmentation tool.

Keywords: Aging; Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis; Biomarker; Brain tissue segmentation; CAT12; SPM12.