Combining the boundary shift integral and tensor-based morphometry for brain atrophy estimation

Mateusz Michalkiewicz, Akshay Pai, Kelvin K. Leung, Stefan Sommer, Sune Darkner, Lauge Sørensen, Jon Sporring, Mads Nielsen

Abstract: Brain atrophy from structural magnetic resonance images (MRIs) is widely used as an imaging surrogate marker for Alzheimers disease. Their utility has been limited due to the large degree of variance and subsequently high sample size estimates. The only consistent and reasonably powerful atrophy estimation methods has been the boundary shift integral (BSI). In this paper, we first propose a tensor-based morphometry (TBM) method to measure voxel-wise atrophy that we combine with BSI. The combined model decreases the sample size estimates significantly when compared to BSI and TBM alone.