The ANTs Longitudinal Cortical Thickness Pipeline
Longitudinal studies of development and disease in the human brain have motivated the acquisition of large neuroimaging data sets and the concomitant development of robust methodological and statistical tools for quantifying neurostructural changes. Longitudinal-specific strategies for acquisition and processing have potentially significant benefits including more consistent estimates of intra-subject measurements while retaining predictive power. In this work, we introduce the open-source Advanced Normalization Tools (ANTs) registration-based cortical thickness longitudinal processing pipeline and its application to the first phase of the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI-1) comprising over 600 subjects with multiple time points from baseline to 36 months. We demonstrate in these data that the single-subject template construction and same orientation processing results in a simultaneous minimization of residual variability and maximization of between-subject variability immediately estimable from a longitudinal mixed-effects modeling strategy. It is known from the statistical literature that optimizing these dual criteria leads to greater scientific interpretability in terms of tighter confidence intervals in calculated mean trends, smaller prediction intervals, and narrower confidence intervals for determining cross-sectional effects. This strategy is evaluated over the entire cortex, as defined by the Desikan-Killiany-Tourville labeling protocol, where comparisons are made with the cross-sectional and longitudinal FreeSurfer processing streams. Subsequent linear mixed effects modeling for identifying diagnostic groupings within the ADNI cohort is provided as supporting evidence for the utility of the proposed ANTs longitudinal framework which provides unbiased structural neuroimage processing and competitive to superior power for longitudinal structural change detection.