A repository of MR morphometry data in Alzheimer´s disease and mild cognitive impairment

This paper presents a novel, publicly available repository of anatomically segmented brain images of healthy subjects as well as patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer´s disease. The underlying magnetic resonance images have been obtained from the Alzheimer´s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. T1-weighted images (1.5 T and 3 T) have been processed with the multi-atlas based MAPER procedure, resulting in labels for 83 regions covering the whole brain in 816 subjects. Volumetric outliers were reviewed visually to identify limitations of the procedure and the segmentations. Morphometric comparisons between diagnostic groups showed highly significant group differences for a number of individual regions in the temporal lobe and parietal lobes. The segmentations are self-consistent, as evidenced by strong agreement between segmentations of paired images acquired at different field strengths (Jaccard coefficient: 0.802 ± 0.0146). This repository of segmentations is a potentially valuable resource to researchers working with ADNI data.