Analysis of Partial Volume Effects on Accurate Measurement of the Hippocampus Volume

Hippocampal volume loss is an important biomarker in distinguishing subjects with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its measurement in magnetic resonance images (MRI) is influenced by partial volume effects (PVE). This paper describes a post-processing approach to quantify PVE for correction of the hippocampal volume by using a spatial fuzzyC-means (SFCM) method. The algorithm is evaluated on a dataset of 20 T1-weighted MRI scans sampled at two different resolutions. The corrected volumes for left and right hippocampus (HC) which are 23% and 18% for the low resolution and 6% and 5% for the high resolution datasets, respectively are lower than hippocampal volume results from manual segmentation. Results show the importance of applying this technique in AD detection with low resolution datasets.