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Updated: May 18, 2026
A Comprehensive Protocol for Manual Segmentation of the Medial Temporal Lobe Structures
Published on: July 2, 2014
Influence of white matter fiber orientation on R2* revealed by MRI segmentation
Francesco de Pasquale1, Andrea Cherubini, Patrice Péran
1Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies, Department of Neuroscience and Imaging, G. D'Annunzio University, Chieti, Italy. f.depasquale@unich.it
Purpose:
To investigate white matter heterogeneity using a multichannel segmentation of a large sample of structural and diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data.
Materials And Methods:
A sample of 50 subjects was segmented using channels comprising exclusively structural (longitudinal and transverse relaxation times T1 and T2 and transverse relaxation rate R2*) and diffusion-based MRI indices (mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy). These data were analyzed using a data driven approach in which no prior information was used.
Results:
The analysis revealed the splitting of white matter into two subclasses in which the longitudinal fasciculi were distinguished from inferior/superior ones. The distribution of the adopted indices in the obtained clusters showed that R2* was mainly responsible for this splitting.
Conclusion:
This result supports the observation, previously hypothesized in the literature, that R2* is influenced by the fiber orientation.
