Hi PPJ,
there is an NIH group (Bagnato, Calabrese, Pezawas, McFarland etc) that did some MS stuff with FreeSurfer. As for the accuracy and interpretation, I guess you need to look at the images to decide whether the cc and basal ganglia results are due to lesions, or more diffuse atrophy. In general things worked pretty well for MS, but we were always very careful to look for lesions to see if they were causing the effects we were detecting.
cheers, Bruce
On Fri, 22 May 2009, Pedro Paulo de Magalhães Oliveira Junior wrote:
I'm not sure whether the Freesurfer list is the appropriate place for this discussion or not, however I'll place the question here and if somebody has an idea we can discuss by pm. Regarding the paper: Focal thinning of the cerebral cortex in multiple sclerosis ( http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~fischl/reprints/Brain2003v126p1734Sailercort... )
AFAIK is the only paper using FreeSurfer to study Multiple Sclerosis. I have a PhD student who is conducting a similar study from the above mentioned paper using FreeSurfer and after data analysis we have some questions:
- The focal thinning pattern we found is similar to the one described in
Sailer's paper. Since that paper is from 2003 I suppose the 4.3 version of FreeSurfer produce results more accurate than that. So confirming that data is an important finding?
- Studying aseg data we found important atrophy of basal ganglia and corpus
callosum. Is the FreeSurfer segmentation accurate enough in presence of MS lesions in T1 imges?
- The atrophy in corpus callosum is not accompanied by cortical thickness
reduction close to this area. Speaking in general: can we think that this atrophy that affects white matter only is caused by misclassified focal lesion?
Thanks in advance for any comments.
PPJ
Pedro Paulo de M. Oliveira Junior Diretor de Operações Netfilter & SpeedComm Telecom --- Novo Netfilter 3.0 www.netfilter.com.br