School of Medicine Publications and Presentations
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-1-2018
Abstract
Cortical surface area is an increasingly used brain morphology metric that is ontogenetically and phylogenetically distinct from cortical thickness and offers a separate index of neurodevelopment and disease. However, the various existing methods for assessment of cortical surface area from magnetic resonance images have never been systematically compared. We show that the surface area method implemented in FreeSurfer corresponds closely to the exact, but computationally more demanding, mass-conservative (pycnophylactic) method, provided that images are smoothed. Thus, the data produced by this method can be interpreted as estimates of cortical surface area, as opposed to areal expansion. In addition, focusing on the joint analysis of thickness and area, we compare an improved, analytic method for measuring cortical volume to a permutation-based nonparametric combination (NPC) method. We use the methods to analyze area, thickness and volume in young adults born preterm with very low birth weight, and show that NPC analysis is a more sensitive option for studying joint effects on area and thickness, giving equal weight to variation in both of these 2 morphological features.
Recommended Citation
Winkler, A. M., Greve, D. N., Bjuland, K. J., Nichols, T. E., Sabuncu, M. R., Håberg, A. K., Skranes, J., & Rimol, L. M. (2018). Joint Analysis of Cortical Area and Thickness as a Replacement for the Analysis of the Volume of the Cerebral Cortex. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 28(2), 738–749. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhx308
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
First Page
738
Last Page
749
Publication Title
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
DOI
10.1093/cercor/bhx308
Academic Level
faculty
Mentor/PI Department
Office of Human Genetics
Comments
Copyright © The Author 2017.