Influence of MR system, field strength and automatic planning routines on Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM)

Purpose: Since the introduction of automated methods for analyzing structural brain imaging data in 2000 (Ashburner J, Friston K: Voxel based morphometry – the methods; NeuroImage, 2000), the number of published papers using this methodology has grown exponentially. Considering the fact that almost every fMRI-study is accompanied with the acquisition of an high resolution T1-weigthed data set, a huge amount of data sets has been acquired over the years, across studies/sites and scanners. In principle, these data could be used for additional morphometric analysis. However, the influence of factors like field stre…