Complexity of cerebral atrophy evaluation in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis context

In Multiple Sclerosis (MS) research, it is of interest to evaluate accurately the whole brain atrophy. To address this purpose, a lot of methods are available in the literature. However, no gold standards are available to study the effects of a treatment. We selected a set of 4 methods based on different approaches. A preliminary study allows us to evaluate the accuracy and the reproducibility of the methods. Then, the methods have been applied on relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis brain MRI. Preliminary study results enforce that the four chosen methods are able to evaluate the atrophy. Nevertheless, results on our dataset present some particularities which are discussed in the paper. These contrasted results do not allow us to select a method as a gold standard (even only on our data) and suggest that atrophy measurement may require an adaptation of a method to the studied context.