Partial volume effect as a hidden covariate in DTI analyses
Abstract
During the last decade, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has been used extensively to investigate microstructural properties of white matter fiber pathways. In many of these DTI-based studies, fiber tractography has been used to infer relationships between bundle-specific mean DTI metrics and measures-of-interest (e.g., when studying diffusion changes related to age, cognitive performance, etc.) or to assess potential differences between populations (e.g., comparing males vs. females, healthy vs. diseased subjects, etc.). As partial volume effects (PVEs) are known to affect tractography and, subsequently, the estimated DTI measures sampled along these reconstructed tracts in an adverse way, it is important to gain insight into potential confounding factors that may modulate this PVE. For instance, for thicker fiber bundles, the contribution of PVE-contaminated voxels to the mean metric for the entire fiber bundle will be smaller, and vice-versa - which means that the extent of PVE-contamination will vary from bundle to bundle. With the growing popularity of tractography-based methods in both fundamental research and clinical applications, it is of paramount importance to examine the presence of PVE-related covariates, such as thickness, orientation, curvature, and shape of a fiber bundle, and to investigate the extent to which these hidden confounds affect diffusion measures. To test the hypothesis that these PVE-related covariates modulate DTI metrics depending on the shape of…
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CSF-based partial volume effects are known to result in artificial FA reductions and MD increases.
“As CSF based partial volume effects are known to result in artificial FA reductions and MD increases (Alexander et al., 2001; Vos et al., 2011; Metzler-Baddeley et al., 2012a), differences between patients and controls may be overestimated and could potentially reflect atrophy rather than intrinsic white matter microstructural changes.”
From The cingulum bundle: Anatomy, function, and dysfunction (2018) · cites this paper as Vos et al., 2011
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- Authors
- Vos, S. B., Jones, D. K., Viergever, M. A., & Leemans, A.
- Affiliations
- University Medical Center Utrecht (NL)
- Cardiff University (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Vos, Sjoerd B.
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2011-04
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1566-1576
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2118811112
- Cited by
- 345
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 30 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 23 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 33 · 2014: 28 · 2013: 30 · 2012: 23
- FWCI
- 23.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Research Bank (Australian Catholic University) (submittedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Care4Me (Cooperative Advanced REsearch for Medical Efficiency)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Functional Brain Connectivity Studies
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging › Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications
- Keywords
- partial volume effect, diffusion tensor imaging, fiber tractography, hidden confounders, fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, cingulum, corpus callosum, sex differences, white matter microstructure
- MeSH terms
- Algorithms, Corpus Callosum, Female, Gyrus Cinguli, Humans, Image Enhancement, Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted, Male, Organ Size, Sensitivity and Specificity, Reproducibility of Results, Artifacts, Imaging, Three-Dimensional, Diffusion Tensor Imaging
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