REVIEW Automatic Detection of White Matter Hyperintensities in Healthy Aging and Pathology Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Review

# The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are commonly seen in the brain of healthy elderly subjects and patients with several neurological and vascular dis-orders. A truly reliable and fully automated method for quantitative assessment of WMH on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has not yet been identified. In this pa-per, we review and compare the large number of auto-mated approaches proposed for segmentation of WMH in the elderly and in patients with vascular risk factors. We conclude that, in order to avoid artifacts and ex-clude the several sources of bias that may influence the analysis, an optimal method should comprise a care-ful preprocessing of the images, be based on multimod-al, complementary data, take into account spatial infor-mation about the lesions and correct for false positives. All these features should not exclude computational leanness and adaptability to available data