The Effect of Segmentation Method on Medial Temporal Lobe Subregion Volumes in Aging

Early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) are associated with volume reductions in specific subregions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Using a manual segmentation method—the Olsen–Amaral–Palombo (OAP) protocol—previous work in healthy older adults showed that reductions in grey matter volumes in MTL subregions were associated with lower scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), suggesting atrophy may occur prior to diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, a condition that often progresses to AD. However, current “gold standard” manual segmentation methods are labour intensive and time consuming. Here, we examined the utility of Automatic Segmentation of Hippocampal Subfields (ASHS) to detect volumetric differences in MTL subregions of healthy older adults who varied in cognitive status as determined by the MoCA. We trained ASHS on the OAP protocol to create the ASHS-OAP atlas and then examined how well automated segmentation replicated manual segmentation. Volumetric measures obtained from the ASHS-OAP atlas were also contrasted against those from the ASHS-PMC atlas, a widely used atlas provided by the ASHS team. The pattern of volumetric results was similar between the ASHS-OAP atlas and manual segmentation for anterolateral entorhinal cortex and perirhinal cortex, suggesting that ASHS-OAP is a viable alternative to current manual segmentation methods for detecting group differences based on cognitive status. Although ASHS-OAP and ASHS-PMC produced varying volumes for most regions of interest, they both identified early signs of neurodegeneration in CA₂/CA₃/DG and identified marginal differences in entorhinal cortex. Our findings highlight the utility of automated segmentation methods but still underscore the need for a unified and harmonized MTL segmentation atlas.