The effect of automatic normative quantification of brain tissue volume on confidence in MRI based diagnosis of dementia: a pilot study

摘要

Introduction: Brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may support dementia diagnosis, but detecting early abnormalities visually and distinguishing these from normal aging remains difficult. Quantitative normative assessment of MRI may be more sensitive to abnormalities and enables comparison of individual patients' brain volumes to reference data from a healthy aging population.~1 We aimed to investigate whether such normative quantification changed confidence of neuroradiologists in dementia diagnosis, compared to routine visual assessment. Four neuroradiologists performed routine visual assessment (VA) of MRI scans of 30 memory clinic patients as well as quantitative assessment (QA) using QuantibTM ND (Fig. 1). They rated diagnostic confidence for both VA and QA, and change in confidence in VA after QA.