Hypothalamic atrophy in progressive supranuclear palsy, assessed by convolutional neural network-based automatic segmentation.

BACKGROUND

The hypothalamus as one of the core structures in metabolic control is increasingly recognized to be morphologically altered in various neurodegenerative diseases.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study was to quantitatively investigate the hypothalamic volumes in patients with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and to compare them with controls and Parkinson disease (PD) patients.

METHODS

An automatic hypothalamic volume quantification method based on the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) of U-Net architecture was applied to the automatic segmentation of the hypothalamus and intracranial volumes (ICV). This CNN-based volumetric analysis was performed in high resolution T1 weighted MRI in two PSP cohorts: cohort A with 78 PSP patients and 63 controls was recorded at 3.0 T at multiple sites; the single site cohort B consisted of 66 PSP patients, 66 PD patients, and 44 controls, recorded at 1.5 T.

RESULTS

In cohort A, significant hypothalamic volume reduction was observed in PSP (774 ± 83 mm3) when compared to controls (817 ± 74 mm3). In cohort B, this result of significant hypothalamic volume reduction was confirmed in PSP (745 ± 102 mm3) when compared to controls (831 ± 81 mm3); no significant hypothalamic volume reduction was observed in PD (797 ± 98 mm3), in support of previous studies.

CONCLUSION

The CNN-based hypothalamus volume quantification study demonstrated significantly reduced hypothalamus volumes in PSP patients compared to controls and PD, respectively; future studies will address the metabolic profiles of PSP as potential functional correlates.