Effect of Enlarged Perivascular Spaces in Reliable Distinction of Prospective Targeting During Deep Brain Stimulation in Patients With Advanced Parkinson's Disease: A Study of Deterministic and Probabilistic Tractography

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Precise electrode position is vital for effective deep brain stimulation in treating motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease (PD). Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVSs) are associated with pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases including PD and may affect the microstructure of surrounding brain tissue. OBJECTIVE: To quantify the clinical implications of enlarged PVS on tractography-based stereotactic targeting in patients with advanced PD selected to undergo deep brain stimulation. METHODS: Twenty patients with PD underwent MRI scanning. The PVS areas were visualized and segmented. Based on the size of the PVS areas, the patient group was split into 2 categories of large vs small PVSs. Probabilistic and deterministic tractography methods were applied to a diffusion-weighted data set. Fiber assignment was performed using motor cortex as an initiation seed and the globus pallidus interna and subthalamic nucleus, separately, as inclusion masks. Two exclusion masks used consisted of cerebral peduncles and the PVS mask. The center of gravity of the tract density map was measured and compared between the tracts generated with and without consideration of the PVS mask. RESULTS: The average differences between the center of gravity of the tracts made by excluding PVS and without excluding PVS using deterministic and probabilistic tractography methods were less than 1 mm. Statistical analysis showed nonsignificant differences between deterministic and probabilistic methods and differences between patients with large and small PVSs (P > .05). CONCLUSION: This study demonstrated that the presence of enlarged PVS is unlikely to affect targeting of basal ganglia nuclei based on tractography.