An empirical comparison of surface-based and volume-based group studies in neuroimaging

Abstract

Thirion. An empirical comparison of surface-based and volume-based group studies in neuroimaging. NeuroImage, Elsevier, 2012, 63 (3) Being able to detect reliably functional activity in a population of subjects is crucial in human brain mapping, both for the understanding of cognitive functions in normal subjects and for the analysis of patient data. The usual approach proceeds by normalizing brain volumes to a common three-dimensional template. However, a large part of the data acquired in fMRI aims at localizing cortical activity, and methods working on the cortical surface may provide better inter-subject registration than the standard procedures that process the data in the volume. Nevertheless, few assessments of the performance of surface-based (2D) versus volume-based (3D) procedures have been shown so far, mostly because inter-subject cortical surface maps are not easily obtained. In this paper we present a systematic comparison of 2D versus 3D group-level inference procedures, by using cluster-level and voxel-level statistics assessed by permutation, in random eects (RFX) and mixed-eects analyses (MFX). We consider dierent schemes to perform meaningful comparisons between thresholded statistical maps in the volume and on the cortical surface. We nd that surface-based multi-subject statistical analyses are generally more sensitive than their volume-based counterpart, in the sense that they detect slightly denser networks of regions when performing peak-level detection; this eect is less clear for cluster-level inference and is reduced by smoothing. Surface-based inference also increases the reliability of the activation maps.

Parcellations and Connectivity Patterns in Human and Macaque Cerebral Cortex

“…Intensive efforts have gone into improving brain atlases and the associated registration methods. For cerebral cortex, surface-based registration (SBR) and surface-based atlases have inherent advantages over conventional, volume-based registration because they respect the topology of the cortical sheet (Anticevic et al 2008;Fischl et al 1999;Frost and Goebel 2012;Tucholka et al 2012;Van Essen et al 2012c). Until recently, the available methods for SBR have used shape cues related to the folding pattern to constrain the registration from individuals to the atlas.…”

Micro-, Meso- and Macro-Connectomics of the Brain

“…Intensive efforts have gone into improving brain atlases and the associated registration methods. For cerebral cortex, surface-based registration (SBR) and surface-based atlases have inherent advantages over conventional, volume-based registration because they respect the topology of the cortical sheet (Anticevic et al 2008;Fischl et al 1999;2008;Frost and Goebel 2012;Tucholka et al 2012;Van Essen et al 2012c). Until recently, the available methods for SBR have used shape cues related to the folding pattern to constrain the registration from individuals to the atlas.…”

Interoperable atlases of the human brain

“…In addition, mapping gross anatomical landmarks on each other usually implies that there is a correspondence between the various local structural and functional features, an assumption that is often not proven. Consequently, aligning gross morphology, until recently the standard approach for matching between subjects and templates, may not always represent the optimal way to map between labels (Brett et al, 2002;Tucholka et al, 2012;Robinson et al, in press;Smith et al, 2013). Furthermore, the relationship between brain morphology and the representations of cortical areas or functional specializations is also variable (Amunts et al, 2004;Eickhoff et al, 2009).…”

“…That is, there can be a complex interaction between the spatial scale of features that can be represented in a map, spatial registration, the choice of the template and of the employed atlas. As a simple example, it has repeatedly been shown that functional maps may be markedly different depending on whether analysis is carried out on volume-or surfacebased templates following volume-and surface-based registration, respectively (Tucholka et al, 2012;Van Essen et al, 2012).…”