2005 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Acquisition-Related Limitations in MRI Based Morphometry
Authors : Arne Littmann, Jens Guehring, Christian Buechel, Hans-Siegfried Stiehl
Published in: Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2005
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
Although significant effort has been spent over the past decades to develop innovative image processing algorithms and to improve existing methods in terms of precision, reproducibility and computational efficiency, relatively few research was undertaken to find out to what extent the validity of results obtained with these methods is limited by inherent imperfections of the input images. This observation is especially true for MRI based morphometry, which aims at precise and highly reproducible determination of geometrical properties of anatomical structures despite the fact that MR images are geometrically distorted. We here present (a) a method for characterization of site-specific geometrical distortions and (b) the results of a long term study designed to find out how precisely geometrical properties and morphological changes of brain structures can, in principle, be detected in images acquired with MRI scanners. Due to the long-term character of our study, our findings include effects resulting from limited hardware stability as well as from variations in patient positioning. Our results show that these effects can be strong enough to substantially confound MRI studies of small morphological changes.