Accurate automatic estimation of total intracranial volume: A nuisance variable with less nuisance

1A well-known source of between-subject variability in total and regional brain volume is the variation in head size, often measured by total intra-cranial volume (TIV, equivalently intra-cranial volume: ICV). For example, some of the difference between the sexes in brain volume can be accounted for by differences in TIV. By modelling otherwise unexplained variability, adjustment for TIV can increase power in studies of overall brain volume, total or local grey matter (GM) volumes, or individual regions of interest (ROI). Similarly, TIV can be a confound in the analysis of group differences or covariate correlates if there is an imbalance in head size between groups, an association of TIV with the covariate of interest, or an interaction involving TIV. Beyond volumetric analysis, TIV may need to be accounted for in structural connectivity measures. In neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) TIV may be used as a proxy for maximum pre-morbid brain volume, which in turn might relate to cognitive reserve.

2TIV may be estimated from volumetric MRI by manual delineation of the cranial vault (for example ), however this requires trained operators, introduces within- and between-rater variability, and is often impractically labour-intensive when dealing with large numbers of scans. Manual measurement of a covariate is an additional burden to the measurement of the variable of interest (such as ROI delineation). Rapid, reproducible, automatic estimation of TIV based on image registration and/or segmentation has obvious appeal. However, automatically derived estimates could be less useful – or even detrimental – if they are more error-prone than manual estimates or if they introduce systematic biases.

3performed an extensive comparison of FreeSurfer 5.1.0 and Statistical Parametric Mapping 8 (SPM8, ) on T1-weighted MRI against manual TIV on PD-weighted MRI, with 399 elderly subjects. Despite good correlation, both automated methods were found to have systematic errors compared to manual segmentation, with SPM8 overestimating TIV by 20.86% and FreeSurfer overestimating by 5.87%. These errors were shown to impact the ability to detect differences in hippocampal volume amongst groups. However an improved segmentation was incorporated into SPM8 as the ‘New Segment’ toolbox ( Appendix A); this included additional tissue maps for non-brain soft-tissue, bone and air/background, which help to reduce the amount of non-brain tissue misclassified as the grey matter or CSF. A smaller study (55 subjects) by found that this segmentation produced more accurate TIV results than the previous versions.

4In the new release, SPM12, ‘New Segment’ has been made the standard segmentation with further improvements, including changes which may make it more robust to brain volume variation. It is therefore an open question whether the problems identified by Nordenskjöld et al. have been addressed in SPM12; we endeavour to answer this question and to compare SPM12 with the latest version of FreeSurfer.

5We analysed T1-weighted MPRAGE scans of 288 (m/f 130/158) subjects aged 50–85 collected as part of a “real-world” multi-centre clinical trial. Subjects met the NINCDS-ADRDA criteria for probable Alzheimer's disease, mean age was 71.8(7.9) years, MMSE at baseline 20.4(3.3). Scans were coronal volumetric acquisitions lasting ≤ 7.5 min, slice thickness 1.5–1.8 mm adjusted to cover the entire brain, slice FOV 25 × 25 cm, and effective matrix size of 256 × 256 × 124. Acquisition parameters varied over the 17 MRI centres, full details can be found in.

6Baseline scans were manually segmented for TIV by four validated operators according to the protocol described in, which we summarise here for convenience. The intracranial volume is defined as the “volume within the cranium, including the brain, meninges, and CSF.” Measurements were conducted with the MIDAS software. Whole-brain volumes were first manually delimited using a 3D morphological method.

7The T1-weighted volumes are rigidly registered to the Montreal Neurological Institute MNI305 brain average. A threshold of 30% of the mean brain signal intensity was used to outline the outer border of the dura as an aid to manual delineation of the outer edge of the intra-cranial volume, and the inferior limit of segmentation is set as the lowest slice in which cerebellar tissue is present. Every 10th axial section was segmented starting from the inferior limit working to the most superior slice with any brain tissue present. Slice areas are linearly interpolated to estimate the TIV for the intervening slices. Intra-rater and inter-rater variabilities were reported to show coefficients of variation (CV) 0.16% (n = 10) and 0.62% (n = 5).

8FreeSurfer determines estimated TIV (known there as eTIV or just ICV) using an atlas scaling factor (i.e. the determinant of an affine transformation matrix) derived from registering images to an average template using a full (12-parameter) affine transformation (; see also http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/eTIV). Segmentation is not used. Here, we use FreeSurfer 5.3.0 (the latest stable release as of April 2014), running “recon-all -autorecon1” and obtaining the ICV using “mri_segstats --etiv-only”.

9There are several methods available to compute TIV using SPM's unified segmentation and spatial normalisation procedure. Methods can be broadly categorised into two main approaches:The spatial normalisation transformation can be used, either inverse-transforming (preserving voxel values rather than volumes) a template-space TIV mask to the individual and determining the volume of the resultant individual-space mask or (equivalently, apart from numerical errors) performing Jacobian integration over a template-space TIV mask.Probabilistic tissue class images can be integrated (i.e. voxels are summed, accounting for the voxel volume) to give tissue volume estimates, with TIV simply being the sum of grey matter, white matter and CSF volumes. A subtlety here is that SPM can provide various sets of tissue class images: native, rigidly-reoriented (and resliced) to standard space, or non-linearly warped to standard space. With volume-preserving transformations1 for the latter, all three sets of images should theoretically agree, except for the fact that they can have different fields of view; this can be important, since the amount of e.g. spinal cord contained in the three fields of view can differ, leading to different TIV estimates. The “modulated” non-linearly warped images (with mwc prefixes) should have the most consistent inferior cut-off, which may be the reason for their slightly better performance compared to the “native” subject-space segments in.

10The spatial normalisation transformation can be used, either inverse-transforming (preserving voxel values rather than volumes) a template-space TIV mask to the individual and determining the volume of the resultant individual-space mask or (equivalently, apart from numerical errors) performing Jacobian integration over a template-space TIV mask.

11Probabilistic tissue class images can be integrated (i.e. voxels are summed, accounting for the voxel volume) to give tissue volume estimates, with TIV simply being the sum of grey matter, white matter and CSF volumes. A subtlety here is that SPM can provide various sets of tissue class images: native, rigidly-reoriented (and resliced) to standard space, or non-linearly warped to standard space. With volume-preserving transformations1 for the latter, all three sets of images should theoretically agree, except for the fact that they can have different fields of view; this can be important, since the amount of e.g. spinal cord contained in the three fields of view can differ, leading to different TIV estimates. The “modulated” non-linearly warped images (with mwc prefixes) should have the most consistent inferior cut-off, which may be the reason for their slightly better performance compared to the “native” subject-space segments in.

12It is important to note that the tissue prior probability templates used in SPM are based on averaging multiple automatically segmented images in standard space (for example, SPM12's priors come from segmentations (using New Segment) of images from the IXI data-set, http://www.brain-development.org/), so there is no guarantee that the sum of grey matter, white matter and CSF classes will be exactly consistent with accepted definitions of TIV, particularly with regard to the inferior cut-off and the inclusion of blood-filled sinuses. For this reason, we used the SPM12 tissue prior maps (and corresponding average T1-weighted, T2-weighted and proton-density weighted images from the same IXI data) to create a manually-corrected TIV mask consistent with the protocol described above (though segmented at each slice). Fig. 1 shows the TIV mask applied to tissue classes. Supplementary Fig. 1 shows a typical illustration of the non-brain classes, which are almost entirely located outside the ICV.

13Although found only very small differences between SPM-based estimates related to approach 1 and approach 2 above, one theoretical advantage of the former is that it yields a contiguous TIV mask, less prone to isolated mis-segmentations far from the intracranial boundaries; a theoretical advantage of the latter approach is that the segmentation can potentially better model finer spatial detail (for example in the slightly more convoluted areas around the temporal lobe and cerebellum) than the regularised (smooth) spatial transformation. In an attempt to combine these advantages, we implemented a “Tissue Volumes” Utility in SPM12, which computes the totals of the modulated warped segmentations within the aforementioned manually-corrected TIV mask. This is available as a built-in SPM utility through the batch editor in the recent beta versions of SPM12.

14The unified segmentation algorithm itself in SPM12 is similar to that in SPM8's New Segment, but with recomputed tissue priors (using multi-modal data from IXI, as mentioned above). An additional change is that the global rescaling of tissue priors present in SPM8's default segmentation but not New Segment was reintroduced.2 In SPM12, each tissue probability map is rescaled by an additional (non-negative) parameter, and then re-normalised so that the priors sum to one at each point in space. The advantage of this more flexible model of SPM12 is that it allows for global decreases or increases in the amount of each tissue type. This is especially important for dealing with the kinds of atrophy seen in studies of ageing or dementia. The models for old and new segment and SPM12 are further detailed in Appendix A.

15SPM12 TIVs were computed using the beta version of SPM12, revision 5647. For comparison, we also use SPM8 (revision 5236), simply summing modulated warped segments without a TIV mask. Finally the Supplementary Table 1 includes results for both the SPM12 Jacobian integration over the TIV mask and volume of the ICV mask transformed to subject-space.

16Results were analysed in STATA 12. To assess suitability of automated TIV as a replacement for manual measurements we calculated squared correlation coefficients (R2) of automatic with manual measures. As the R2 coefficient represents the degree to which variation in each variable is explained by the other, the R2 between the two measures indicates the worst-case loss of explanatory power replacing one with the other as a correlate in a linear model. A high R2 compared to the gold standard therefore indicates a method that can be used as a proxy for this purpose. Confidence intervals (CI, 95%) on R2 coefficients and regression coefficients β were estimated using bootstrapping (20,000 samples each test, bias-corrected and accelerated). The same bootstrapping procedure was used to test the paired difference in R2 coefficient between the automated TIV methods.

17Bland–Altman (B–A) plots were used to assess the agreement of values from the automated and manual TIV. It is expected that two measures of the same quantity should report the same result, that is: a slope of regression close to 1 (measurement error reduces the measured slope) and differences between measures due only to random error with mean 0 and a standard deviation that is acceptably small. Plotting difference against mean value allows assessment of bias and deviation from parity, using standard t-tests and linear regression. Pitman's test (significance of correlation of difference to mean) was applied to compare variance of the measures.

18We do not attempt to compare ICV classification images as two of the methods do not produce them. Our reference, manual segmentation is performed only for every 10th axial section, and the FreeSurfer estimate uses only the atlas scaling factor.

19FreeSurfer failed to register two scans to its atlas correctly, producing TIV estimates > 3000 ml. These two were dropped from the analysis for FreeSurfer, though these subjects were still included for the SPM8 and SPM12 analysis. Mean (SD) manual TIV was 1428.0 (143.5) ml. Table 1 shows correlation and difference for automated methods compared to manual measurements. Direct comparison of R2 values using bootstrapping found SPM12 R2 significantly higher than FreeSurfer (difference 0.139, CI (0.101 0.194), p < 0.001) and FreeSurfer R2 significantly higher than SPM8 (difference 0.224, CI (0.158 0.294), p < 0.001).

20The agreement of the different automated methods with manually delineated TIVs is illustrated in Fig. 2. Pitman's test indicated significant difference of variance compared to manual measure for both FreeSurfer and SPM8 (p < 0.001). SPM12 was the only measure where the results were consistent with the variance being the same (p = 0.95). A significant difference in Pitman's test may be due either to a difference in variance of the two methods being compared or not being bivariate-normally distributed. This cannot be disambiguated without repeated measurements.

21We have compared three automated measures (SPM12, SPM8, FreeSurfer) of TIV with a manual (gold standard) measurement. The high correlation coefficient, narrow limits of agreement and low slope of the B–A plots for SPM12 shown in Fig. 2 suggest that this was the most effective substitute for manual TIV as a covariate in linear models. Results demonstrate a significant improvement over the default SPM8 segmentation and over FreeSurfer. There is a small underestimate in the SPM12 TIV measure compared to manual, which might be due to the blood-filled sinuses being effectively excluded from the tissue segments (i.e. they typically have low probabilities for GM, WM and CSF) even though they are included in the mask. This small bias is of little concern for the use of TIV as a nuisance covariate, since the effect on factors/covariates of interest when adjusting for a nuisance covariate is invariant to affine transformation of that covariate.

22Whether the impact of TIV measurement accuracy on a study will be significant will inevitably vary depending on the strength and nature of the underlying relationship, the size of the study, the effect size being measured and the natural variation independent of TIV. In the differences between methods are enough to change the significance of results in a study of 399 subjects. In the Supplementary material we have attempted to simulate the effect TIV measurement error would have on estimated effect size in a simple model of hippocampal volume, this is shown in Supplementary Fig. 2. While there are many factors unaccounted for it remains a good rule of thumb that reducing any measurement errors is a good practice.

23We have assumed above that adjustment for TIV will be performed by including it as a covariate in a linear model (also known as analysis of covariance, ANCOVA), rather than e.g. dividing regional brain volumes by TIV (known as the proportion method); it is also possible to use a previously fitted regression model (e.g. from a large normative study) to adjust volumes in individuals (known as the residual[isation] method). The relative merits of these methods have been debated in the literature. demonstrated problems with the proportion method (reduced joint reliability), and noted that other methods such as regression, “may yield measurements that are more appropriate than ratios”. observed that, “whereas residual scores were uncorrelated with head size (by definition), measures taken as a proportion of head size tended to persist in showing correlations with head size,” which suggests that the former is preferable for adjustment; however, they also note that this property of the latter can be of interest in its own right, in terms of understanding the scaling laws of the brain (see also the discussion of allometry in )., “found that the residual method generally was less affected by systematic and random errors in ICV and APV [absolute parenchymal volume] values, with the exception of dependent-related APV systematic error”, with the proportion method only being preferable in the latter case. regressed logarithmically transformed regional volumes against log(TIV) and found confidence intervals often excluded unity, which further argues against the use of the proportion method; however, the question of whether to log-transform or not arguably remains open.

24observe that the ANCOVA and residual approaches have the flexibility to be extended to model a quadratic effect of TIV, allowing for nonlinear relationships between regional volumes and head size. For the case of mass-univariate voxel-wise or vertex-wise analysis, the ANCOVA approach has the advantage that the model can straightforwardly vary over the brain. Furthermore, the ANCOVA model allows interaction terms to be modelled, e.g. between diagnostic group and TIV. One could even consider higher order polynomial expansions of TIV – and/or logarithmically or otherwise transformed TIV – interacting with group or other variables. In combination with the above-surveyed advantages, the greater flexibility of the ANCOVA model leads us to recommend it as the first choice to consider. In situations where it is feasible (i.e. no more than a few ROIs) we would also recommend approach of graphically investigating the relationship between regional volume(s) and TIV.

25Two popular software packages for voxel-based morphometry, VBM83 and FSL-VBM4 recommend a strategy to adjust for head-size by modifying the volume-preserving Jacobian-modulation step such that the affine component is ignored and only the nonlinear volume changes are preserved. This is equivalent to fully preserving the original volume with the usual (affine and nonlinear) Jacobian modulation and subsequently dividing by an estimated TIV obtained from the determinant of the affine transformation. We have not here evaluated the use of the affine determinant from SPM12's unified segmentation to estimate TIV, but there seems no reason to expect SPM12's affine determinant to perform better than FreeSurfer's affine-based estimate.

26Since (a) we have shown that SPM12 can provide significantly better estimated TIV than FreeSurfer's affine-based estimate, and (b) we have discussed the limitations of adjustment by division, nonlinear-only modulation may be seen as a convenient but possibly suboptimal procedure.

27It is often the practice when dealing with automated methods to screen for failures and attempt alternative methods to recover from them (either adjustments to parameters or resorting to another technique). Doing so raises questions of how to define and screen for failures, as well as whether any adjustments should be incorporated as improvements to the method used. On inspecting the range of results we decided to regard as suspicious any estimated TIV greater than 3000 ml and that omitting the two clear failures in the case of FreeSurfer was a fairer comparison of “out-of-the-box” performance. Omission of the corresponding values from the SPM comparisons has little effect on results (Supplementary Table 1). Additionally we attempted to fix the two FreeSurfer failures by suppressing the automated registration checking using the “-notal-check” option for those cases and results for these can be found in Inline Supplementary Table 1. The absence of any notable outliers for SPM12 suggests a good degree of algorithmic robustness.

28Only the numerical results were screened for outliers, no routine quality control was applied to the individual images.

29We have not directly investigated the effect of atrophy on TIV estimates (cf. ). Our sample population were all probable-AD trial participants with varying degrees of atrophy at baseline (mean manual brain volume:manual TIV ratio 0.69 ± 0.05, min 0.56 max 0.81); the high agreement with manual measures shown by SPM12 is apparently not affected by this. Both and find only small variability over time for manual TIV measures. However, further longitudinal evaluation (as in ) of the SPM12 method could provide greater reassurance that tissue loss does not change TIV estimates.

30Although a large number of different sites and scanners were included here, without obvious detriment to the results, all scanners were 1.5 T, so we cannot claim to have demonstrated robustness to different field strengths (cf. ).

31Whilst we have shown very good agreement between SPM12 and manually-measured TIV, we have not directly evaluated the effect of replacing manual with SPM12 values in investigations of other factors such as hippocampal volume as in, though the simulations in Supplementary Fig. 2 shed some light on this.

32It would also be of interest to evaluate SPM12's performance on data other than T1-weighted MRI; for example, and favour proton-density (PD) weighted imaging, whilst shows the advantages of T2-weighted MRI. Multi-spectral segmentation of quantitative multi-parametric maps would be expected to yield even better results, since the combination of PD with other contrasts (including R2*, related to T2) should enhance the distinctions between brain tissue and blood-filled sinuses, and between the CSF and bone/air. It is plausible that automatic methods, perhaps with further refinements, could actually yield more accurate measurements than the current manual gold standard, especially with the latter's use of only every 10th slice, however, demonstrating this would be challenging, requiring somewhat indirect evaluation.

33We have shown that TIV estimated using SPM12 correlates very strongly with manually-traced TIV, providing superior performance to TIV estimates from SPM8 or FreeSurfer. For regional and mass-univariate volumetric studies, we recommend the use of TIV as a covariate in a linear model, which enables the consideration of nonlinearities (i.e. with TIV and TIV-squared) and/or interactions between TIV and other terms.