Abstract
Aberrant brain structural change in cirrhotic patients with or without hepatic encephalopathy is one of the most typical cases in voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies. However, there exist inconsistent results regarding to the volume change of the thalamus. Furthermore, the relationship between thalamus structural change and cirrhotic symptoms has not yet been fully elucidated. To address these two issues, we repeated two VBM analyses in SPM and FreeSurfer and compared the two measurements with manually measured thalamic volumes. We also correlated the VBM results with clinical indexes related to cirrhosis to further investigate the relationship between thalamic structural change and liver cirrhosis. The inconsistent result of thalamic structural change was successfully reproduced in regard to the volume measurements of SPM and FreeSurfer. The manually measured results demonstrate an increase in the volume of the thalamus in cirrhotic patients compared to healthy controls, which differs from the results of FreeSurfer. The structural change of thalamus closely correlated with the blood biochemical indexes, including albumin levels, blood coagulation time, and AST/ALT ratio. All of these biochemical indexes are closely related to the severity of liver cirrhosis. Beyond all the results, this study also provides a good demonstration of the difference between multiple VBM measurements for clinicians.
Highlights
Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is a neuroimaging technique that allows for the investigation of focal structural differences in the brain, and it has been widely used to characterize the patterns of brain structural changes in various neurodegenerative diseases (Ashburner and Friston, 2000; Good et al, 2001; Nickson et al, 2016; Voets et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2016)
Decreased grey matter volume was found in bilateral caudatum and globus pallidus, left hippocampus, and cerebellar vermis in cirrhotic patients, while significant increased grey matter volume was observed in bilateral thalamus and the calcarine cortex (Fig. 1)
There was no difference in whole brain grey matter (GM) and white matter (WM) volumes among three groups (Table 2)
Summary
Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is a neuroimaging technique that allows for the investigation of focal structural differences in the brain, and it has been widely used to characterize the patterns of brain structural changes in various neurodegenerative diseases (Ashburner and Friston, 2000; Good et al, 2001; Nickson et al, 2016; Voets et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2016). It is a common method utilized to characterize brain structural differences regarding to different populations, such as difference in gender or ethnic (Ashburner et al, 1998; Chen et al, 2007; Ruigrok et al, 2014). The study of Montoliu et al used FreeSurfer (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu) to segment different brain regions and calculate the volume of each brain region, while the other
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