Estimated intracranial volume from FreeSurfer is biased by total brain volume

BackgroundEstimated intracranial volume (eTIV) from FreeSurfer is not segmentation-based but calculated from the alignment of the input magnetic resonance (MR) images to the MNI305 brain atlas, an approach that could lead to a bias by total brain volume. If eTIV is unbiased, variance beyond that explained by intracranial volume should be random. Our null hypothesis was that no correlation would remain between eTIV and total brain volume when controlling for intracranial volume.MethodseTIV and total brain volume for 62 participants were calculated on 1.5-T, T1-weighted MR images using FreeSurfer (version 6.0.0). Manual delineations of the intracranial volume were also made for the same images. To evaluate the null hypothesis, the partial correlation between eTIV and total brain volume was calculated when controlling for intracranial volume.ResultsThe partial correlation between eTIV and total brain volume when controlling for intracranial volume was 0.355 (p = 0.026). The null hypothesis was rejected.ConclusioneTIV from FreeSurfer is biased by total brain volume.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  European Radiology Experimental

• Publication date

  2018-09-19

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/s41747-018-0055-4PMCID 6143491
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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