Quantitative assessment of field strength, total intracranial volume, sex, and age effects on the goodness of harmonization for volumetric analysis on the ADNI database

We present a comparison of three methods for estimating total intracranial volume to assess their robustness and correct the brain str ucture volumes using the residual method and the proportional (normalization by division) method. We then evaluated the distribution of brain structure volumes over the entire ADNI database before and after accounting for multiple covariates such as total intracranial volume, scanner field strength, sex, and age using two techniques: (a) Zscapes, a panoramic visualization technique to analyze the entire database and (b) empirical cumulative distributions functions. The results from this study highlight the importance of assessing the goodness of data harmonization as a necessary preprocessing step when pooling large data set with multiple covariates, prior to further statistical data analysis.

Source: Human Brain Mapping - November 15, 2018 Category: Neurology Authors: Da Ma, Karteek Popuri, Mahadev Bhalla, Oshin Sangha, Donghuan Lu, Jiguo Cao, Claudia Jacova, Lei Wang, Mirza Faisal Beg, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative Tags: RESEARCH ARTICLE Source Type: research