Other researchers have proposed that the brain parenchymal fraction (or brain atrophy) may be a good surrogate measure for disease progression in patients with Multiple Sclerosis. This paper considers various factors influencing the measure of the brain parenchymal fraction obtained from dual spin-echo PD and T2-weighted head MRI scans. We investigate the robustness of the brain parenchymal fraction with respect to two factors: brain-mask border placement which determines the brain intra-dural volume, and brain scan incompleteness. We show that an automatic method for brain segmentation produces an atrophy measure which is fairly sensitive to the brain-mask placement. We also show that a robust, reproducible brain atrophy measure can be obtained from incomplete brain scans, using data in a centrally placed subvolume of the brain.

Date Published: 9 May 2002
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 4684, Medical Imaging 2002: Image Processing, (9 May 2002);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4684:
Medical Imaging 2002: Image Processing
Milan Sonka; J. Michael Fitzpatrick, Editor(s)