Evaluation of brain atrophy measures in MRI

Other researchers have proposed that the brain parenchymal fraction (or brain atrophy) may be a good surrogate measure for disease progression in patients with multiple sclerosis. This paper considers various factors influencing the measure of the brain parenchymal fraction obtained from head MRI scans. An automatic segmentation method for the brain and for the cerebral spinal fluid is evaluated and the sensitivity of the brain atrophy measure to various parameters is measured. We show that our automatic method can provide robust, reproducible brain atrophy measures.