An MRI-based approach for the measurement of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in humans.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been implicated in the pathophysiology of mental disorders. Previous region-of-interest MRI studies that attempted to delineate this region adopted various landmarks and measurement techniques, with inconsistent results. We developed a new region-of-interest measurement method to obtain morphometric data of this region from structural MRI scans, taking into account knowledge from cytoarchitectonic postmortem studies and the large inter-individual variability of this region. MRI scans of 10 subjects were obtained, and DLPFC tracing was performed in the coronal plane by two independent raters using the semi-automated software Brains2. The intra-class correlation coefficients between two independent raters were 0.94 for the left DLPFC and 0.93 for the right DLPFC. The mean +/- S.D. DLPFC volumes were 9.23 +/- 2.35 ml for the left hemisphere and 8.20 +/- 2.08 ml for the right hemisphere. Our proposed method has high inter-rater reliability and is easy to implement, permitting the standardized measurement of this region for clinical research applications
Sanches
Marsal
M
Department of Psychiatry, Federal University of São Paulo, Rua Botucatu, São Paulo, 740 CEP 04023-900, Brazil.
Caetano
Sheila
S
Nicoletti
Mark
M
Monkul
E Serap
ES
Chen
Hua Hsuan
HH
Hatch
John P
JP
Yeh
Ping-Hong
PH
Mullis
Rachel L
RL
Keshavan
Matcheri S
MS
Rajowska
Grazyna
G
Soares
Jair C
JC
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results