David Fenton Abbott1,2, Gaby S. Pell1,2, Heath Pardoe1,2, Graeme D. Jackson1,3
1Brain Research Institute, Florey Neuroscience Institutes (Austin), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 2Department of Medicine, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; 3Departments of Medicine and Radiology, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Abnormalities in the brain generally manifest on MRI as changes in shape (morphometry) or changes in the nature of the tissue (signal intensity). Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) is a well-known whole brain quantitative way of assessing morphometric changes. Here we demonstrate the effectiveness of a complementary method, Voxel-Based Iterative Sensitivity (VBIS) analysis, applied to directly assess signal intensity of T1-weighted MRI. In a group of patients with left hippocampal sclerosis, compared to healthy controls, VBIS-T1 was able to detect the major regions of tissue abnormality as well as more subtle pathology often not evident using conventional quantitative measures.