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Comparison of fMRI coregistration results between human experts and software solutions in patients and healthy subjects

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Abstract

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) performed by echo-planar imaging (EPI) is often highly distorted, and it is therefore necessary to coregister the functional to undistorted anatomical images, especially for clinical applications. This pilot study provides an evaluation of human and automatic coregistration results in the human motor cortex of normal and pathological brains. Ten healthy right-handed subjects and ten right-handed patients performed simple right hand movements during fMRI. A reference point chosen at a characteristic anatomical location within the fMRI sensorimotor activations was transferred to the high resolution anatomical MRI images by three human fMRI experts and by three automatic coregistration programs. The 3D distance between the median localizations of experts and programs was calculated and compared between patients and healthy subjects. Results show that fMRI localization on anatomical images was better with the experts than software in 70% of the cases and that software performance was worse for patients than healthy subjects (unpaired t-test: P = 0.040). With 45.6 mm the maximum disagreement between experts and software was quite large. The inter-rater consistency was better for the fMRI experts compared to the coregistration programs (ANOVA: P = 0.003). We conclude that results of automatic coregistration should be evaluated carefully, especially in case of clinical application.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (P15102). We want to acknowledge important general support by Prof. Lueder Deecke, Department of Clinical Neurology, Medical University of Vienna, Head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Functional Brain Topography.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Study Group Clinical fMRI at the Departments of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Radiology, MR Center of Excellence, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Andreas Gartus, Alexander Geissler, Thomas Foki, Amir Reza Tahamtan, Gerald Pahs, Markus Barth, Katja Pinker, Siegfried Trattnig & Roland Beisteiner

  2. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Functional Brain Topography, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Andreas Gartus, Alexander Geissler, Thomas Foki, Amir Reza Tahamtan, Gerald Pahs & Roland Beisteiner

  3. Department of Neurology, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Andreas Gartus, Alexander Geissler, Thomas Foki, Amir Reza Tahamtan, Gerald Pahs & Roland Beisteiner

  4. Department of Radiology, Medical University of Vienna, Waehringer Guertel 18-20, 1090, Vienna, Austria

    Markus Barth, Katja Pinker & Siegfried Trattnig

  5. FC Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, P.O. Box 9101, 6500 HB, Nijmegan, The Netherlands

    Markus Barth

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  1. Andreas Gartus
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Correspondence to Roland Beisteiner.

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Gartus, A., Geissler, A., Foki, T. et al. Comparison of fMRI coregistration results between human experts and software solutions in patients and healthy subjects. Eur Radiol 17, 1634–1643 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-006-0459-z

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