Comparing CAT12 and VBM8 for Detecting Brain Morphological Abnormalities in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Abstract

The identification of the brain morphological alterations that play important roles in neurodegenerative/neurological diseases will contribute to our understanding of the causes of these diseases. Various automated software programs are designed to provide an automatic framework to detect brain morphological changes in structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. A voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis can also be used for the detection of brain volumetric abnormalities. Here, we compared gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) abnormality results obtained by a VBM analysis using the Computational Anatomy Toolbox (CAT12) via the current version of Statistical Parametric Mapping software (SPM12) with the results obtained by a VBM analysis using the VBM8 toolbox implemented in the older software SPM8, in adult temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients with (n = 51) and without (n = 57) hippocampus sclerosis (HS), compared to healthy adult controls (n = 28). The VBM analysis using CAT12 showed that compared to the healthy controls, significant GM and WM reductions were located in ipsilateral mesial temporal lobes in the TLE-HS patients, and slight GM amygdala swelling was present in the right TLE-no patients (n = 27). In contrast, the VBM analysis via the VBM8 toolbox showed significant GM and WM reductions only in the left TLE-HS patients (n = 25) compared to the healthy controls. Our findings thus demonstrate that compared to VBM8, a VBM analysis using CAT12 provides a more accurate volumetric analysis of the brain regions in TLE. Our results further indicate that a VBM analysis using CAT12 is more robust and accurate against volumetric alterations than the VBM8 toolbox.

Emphasis Learning, Features Repetition in Width Instead of Length to Improve Classification Performance: Case Study—Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

“…Note that using CAT12 for MRI segmentation and feature extraction can also obtain promising results, as reported by Farokhian et al [29]. This study demonstrated better performance using CAT12 over VBM8 tools.…”

Recovery of cortical volume and thickness after remission from acute anorexia nervosa

“…To assess the mean VBM values in different ROIs, we applied the CAT12 “Estimate Mean Values inside ROI” function using the LONI Probabilistic Brain Atlas (LPBA40) (Shattuck et al, ). Compared to VBM8, CAT12 provided a more accurate volumetric analysis of the brain in temporal lobe epilepsy (Farokhian, Beheshti, Sone, & Matsuda, ). The results of the SPM‐full factorial model t‐contrasts (AN vs. HC, REC vs. AN, REC vs. HC, and vice versa) were saved as thresholded log‐p GM volume maps.…”

Relating quantitative 7T MRI across cortical depths to cytoarchitectonics, gene expression and connectomics: a framework for tracking neurodegenerative disease

“…In order to create cortical layers, first CAT12 (http://www.neuro.uni-jena.de/cat) was used to create GM and WM tissue probability maps (TPMs) from the synthetic T1w image. In CAT12 the synthetic image was spatially normalised using an affine and a non-linear registration, bias field correction was applied and the image was segmented into GM, WM and CSF (Farokhian et al, 2017). CAT12 was used instead of SPM segment as it resulted in more accurate WM segmentations for the 7T images with much higher WM tissue probabilities.…”