Assessment of the increase in variability when combining volumetric data from different scanners

In multicenter MRI studies, pooling of volumetric data requires a prior evaluation of compatibility between the different machines used. We tested the compatibility of five different scanners (2 General Electric Signa, 2 Siemens Symphony, and a Philips Gyroscan) at five different sites by repeating the scans of five volunteers at each of the sites. Using a semiautomatic method based on the Talairach atlas, and SPM algorithms for tissue segmentation (multimodal T1 and T2, or T1-only), we obtained volume measurements of the main brain lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital, temporal) and for each tissue type. Our results suggest that pooling of multisite data adds small error for whole brain measurements, intersite coefficient of variation (CV) ranging from 1.8 to 5.2%, respectively, for GM and CSF. However, in the occipital lobe, intersite CV can be as high as 11.7% for WM and 17.3% for CSF. Compared with the intersite, intrasite CV values were always much lower. Whenever possible, T1 and T2 tissue segmentation methods should be used because they yield more consistent volume measurements between sites than T1-only, especially when some of the scans were obtained with different sequence parameters and pixel size from those of the other sites. Our study shows that highest compatibility among scanners would be obtained using equipments of the same manufacturer and also image acquisition parameters as similar as possible. After validation, data from a specific ROI or scanner showing values markedly different from the other sites might be excluded from the analysis.