Atlas-based whole brain white matter analysis using large deformation diffeomorphic metric mapping: Application to normal elderly and Alzheimer's disease participants

The purpose of this paper is to establish single-participant white matter atlases based on diffusion tensor imaging. As one of the applications of the atlas, automated brain segmentation was performed and the accuracy was measured using Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM). High-quality diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data from a single-participant were B0-distortion-corrected and transformed to the ICBM-152 atlas or to Talairach coordinates. The deep white matter structures, which have been previously well documented and clearly identified by DTI, were manually segmented. The superficial white matter areas beneath the cortex were defined, based on a population-averaged white matter probability map. The white matter was parcellated into 176 regions based on the anatomical labeling in the ICBM-DTI-81 atlas. The automated parcellation was achieved by warping this parcellation map to normal controls and to Alzheimer's disease patients with severe anatomical atrophy. The parcellation accuracy was measured by a kappa analysis between the automated and manual parcellation at 11 anatomical regions. The kappa values were 0.70 for both normal controls and patients while the inter-rater reproducibility was 0.81 (controls) and 0.82 (patients), suggesting “almost perfect” agreement. A power analysis suggested that the proposed method is suitable for detecting FA and size abnormalities of the white matter in clinical studies.