REPRODUCIBILITY OF INTRACRANIAL VOLUME MEASUREMENT BY UNSUPERVISED MULTISPECTRAL BRAIN SEGMENTATION

To assess the inter-study variability of a recently published unsuperv ised segmentation method (Magn. Reson. Med. 1997;37:84-93), 14 brain M R studies were performed in five normal subjects, Standard deviations for absolute and fractional volumes of intracranial compartments, whic h reflect the experimental variability, were smaller than 16.5 mi and 1.1%, respectively, By comparing the experimental component of the var iability with the variability observed in our reference database, an e stimate of the biological variability of the intracranial fractional v olumes in the database population was obtained.