Diagnosing Parkinson's disease by combining neuromelanin and iron imaging features using an automated midbrain template approach.

Background And Purpose: Early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) is still a clinical challenge. Most previous studies using manual or semi-automated methods for segmenting the substantia nigra (SN) are time-consuming and, despite raters being well-trained, individual variation can be significant. In this study, we used a template-based, automatic, SN subregion segmentation pipeline to detect the neuromelanin (NM) and iron features in the SN and SN pars compacta (SNpc) derived from a single 3D magnetization transfer contrast (MTC) gradient echo (GRE) sequence in an attempt to develop a comprehensive imaging biomarker that could be used to diagnose PD.

Materials And Methods: A total of 100 PD patients and 100 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs) were imaged on a 3T scanner. NM-based SN (SN) boundaries and iron-based SN (SN) boundaries and their overlap region (representing the SNpc) were delineated automatically using a template-based SN subregion segmentation approach based on quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) and NM images derived from the same MTC-GRE sequence. All PD and HC subjects were evaluated for the nigrosome-1 (N1) sign by two raters independently. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analyses were performed to evaluate the utility of SN volume, SN volume, SNpc volume and iron content with a variety of thresholds as well as the N1 sign in diagnosing PD. Correlation analyses were performed to study the relationship between these imaging measures and the clinical scales in PD.

Results: In this study, we verified the value of the fully automatic template based midbrain deep gray matter mapping approach in differentiating PD patients from HCs. The automatic segmentation of the SN in PD patients led to satisfactory DICE similarity coefficients and volume ratio (VR) values of 0.81 and 1.17 for the SN, and 0.87 and 1.05 for the SN, respectively. For the HC group, the average DICE similarity coefficients and VR values were 0.85 and 0.94 for the SN, and 0.87 and 0.96 for the SN, respectively. The SN volume tended to decrease with age for both the PD and HC groups but was more severe for the PD group. For diagnosing PD, the N1 sign performed reasonably well by itself (Area Under the Curve (AUC) = 0.783). However, combining the N1 sign with the other quantitative measures (SN volume, SN volume, SNpc volume and iron content) resulted in an improved diagnosis of PD with an AUC as high as 0.947 (using an SN threshold of 50ppb and an NM threshold of 0.15). Finally, the SN volume showed a negative correlation with the MDS-UPDRS III (R = 0.1, p = 0.036) and the Hoehn and Yahr scale (R = 0.04, p = 0.013) in PD patients.

Conclusion: In summary, this fully automatic template based deep gray matter mapping approach performs well in the segmentation of the SN and its subregions for not only HCs but also PD patients with SN degeneration. The combination of the N1 sign with other quantitative measures (SN volume, SN volume, SNpc volume and iron content) resulted in an AUC of 0.947 and provided a comprehensive set of imaging biomarkers that, potentially, could be used to diagnose PD clinically.