Evaluation of Multiple Voxel-Based Morphometry Approaches and Applications in the Analysis of White Matter Changes in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The purpose of this study was to compare multiple voxel-based morphometry (VBM) approaches and analyze the whole-brain white matter (WM) changes in the unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients relative to controls. In our study, the performance of the VBM approaches, including standard VBM, optimized VBM and VBM-DARTEL, was evaluated via a simulation, and then these VBM approaches were applied to the real data obtained from the TLE patients and controls. The results from simulation show that VBM-DARTEL performs the best among these VBM approaches. For the real data, WM reductions were found in the ipsilateral temporal lobe, the contralateral frontal and occipital lobes, the bilateral parietal lobes, cingulated gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and brainstem of the left-TLE patients by VBM-DARTEL, which is consistent with previous studies. Our study demonstrated that DARTEL was the most robust and reliable approach for VBM analysis.