Dear Tracy,
It is true that we haven’t validated our software on such a young population, but I believe that, at age four, the appearance of the brain is close enough to that of adults for automated techniques do a good job (e.g., FreeSurfer has been used on children scans in many studies). Having said that, QCing a bunch of cases would be appropriate. Tracing the subfields in vivo with our ex vivo protocol to enable direct comparison (e.g., Dice scores) is nearly impossible, but a visual assessment of whether the segmentation follows the anatomy should be sufficient.
Kind regards,
/Eugenio
Juan Eugenio Iglesias ERC Senior Research Fellow Translational Imaging Group University College London http://www.jeiglesias.com http://cmictig.cs.ucl.ac.uk/
On 9 Jan 2017, at 20:03, Tracy Riggins <riggins@umd.edumailto:riggins@umd.edu> wrote:
Dr. Inglesias
I am a developmental psychologist studying memory and brain development in early childhood at the University of Maryland. My lab has acquired whole-brain standard resolution T1-weighted scans and ultra-high resolution T2-weighted scans from 125 child participants aged 4-8 years. We are using your automatic segmentation for hippocampal subregions to obtain volumes for assessment in our study.
As we write up the results for publication, I began to wonder if reviewers will ask for verification that the automatic segmentation is valid for our young age group. I know you tested Alzheimer's and an elderly sample in your paper, so I suspect it is valid for a variety of populations. But I am writing to inquire your thoughts on this issue. Do you think verification is needed? If so, would you suggest we hand trace a subset of our data to verify the automatic methods? I would appreciate any advise as to how to best approach this.
Thank you, in advance, for your consideration of my inquiry.
Sincerely, Tracy
Tracy Riggins, Ph.D. Associate Professor University of Maryland
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