T2 Relaxometry in Patients with Parkinson’s Disea

Authors: Karl Egger Florian Amtage Shan Yang Markus Obmann Ralf Schwarzwald Lena Köstering Irina Mader Julia Koenigsdorf Cornelius Weiller Christoph P Kaller Horst Urbach

Publish Date: 2016/06/22

Volume: 28, Issue: 1, Pages: 63-67

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Abstract

Magnetic resonance MR relaxometry is of increasing scientific relevance in neurodegenerative disorders but is still not established in clinical routine Several studies have investigated relaxation time alterations in diseasespecific areas in Parkinson’s disease PD all using manually drawn regions of interest ROI Implementing MR relaxometry into the clinical setting involves the reduction of time needed for postprocessing using an investigatorindependent and reliable approach The aim of this study was to evaluate an automated atlasbased ROI method for evaluating T2 relaxation times in patients with PDAutomated atlasbased ROI analysis of quantitative T2 maps were generated from 20 PD patients and 20 controls To test for the accuracy of the atlasbased ROI segmentation we evaluated the spatial overlap in comparison with manually segmented ROIs using the Dice similarity coefficient DSC Additionally we tested for group differences using our automated atlasbased ROIs of the putamen globus pallidus and substantia nigraA good spatial overlap accuracy was shown for the automated segmented putamen mean DSC 064 ± 004 and was inferior but still acceptable for the substantia nigra mean DSC 050 ± 017 Based on our automated defined ROI selection a significant decrease of T2 relaxation time was found in the putamen as well as in the internal and external globus pallidus in PD patients compared with healthy controls

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