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A comparison of FreeSurfer-generated data with and without manual intervention
Christopher S McCarthy1, Avinash Ramprashad1, Carlie Thompson1
1Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Center for Psychiatric Neuroimaging, State University of New York at Upstate Medical University Syracuse, NY, USA.
Frontiers in Neuroscience
|November 6, 2015
Summary
Editing FreeSurfer data with control points minimally impacts brain metrics like surface area and white matter volumes, suggesting automated pipelines are generally reliable for neuroimaging research.
Area of Science:
- Neuroimaging
- Neuroscience
- Medical Image Analysis
Background:
- FreeSurfer (FS) is widely used for automated neuroimaging analysis.
- White matter segmentation errors can affect data reliability.
- Control points can be used to manually correct segmentation errors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To compare FreeSurfer-generated neuroimaging data between automated and manually edited pipelines.
- To assess the impact of manual editing on key brain metrics and group difference detection.
- To evaluate FreeSurfer data quality across different magnetic field strengths (1.5T and 3T).
Main Methods:
- Comparison of surface area, white matter volumes, and cortical thickness from edited and unedited FreeSurfer datasets.
- Analysis of 34 regions of interest (ROIs) in 30 individuals, including those with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS).
- Calculation and comparison of effect sizes between patient and control groups for both edited and unedited data.
Main Results:
- Most surface area and white matter volume metrics did not significantly differ between edited and unedited data for both 1.5T and 3T scanners.
- Cortical thickness measures showed significant differences in seven ROIs, primarily in frontal and temporal regions, when comparing edited vs. unedited data.
- Mean effect sizes for group differences were largely similar between edited and unedited ROIs, regardless of scanner strength.
Conclusions:
- Manual editing of FreeSurfer data with control points may enhance segmentation validity but often does not substantially alter final extracted metrics.
- Automated FreeSurfer pipelines generally yield reliable data for surface area and white matter volumes.
- While cortical thickness may be more sensitive to editing, overall group-level findings are typically consistent, supporting the robustness of FreeSurfer analyses.
