Estimation of total intracranial volume - a comparison of methods

Total intracranial volume is a useful measure of inter-subject variability in pre-morbid brain volume, which has been recommended for inclusion in region of interest and voxel-based morphometric studies of dementia [1]. TIV can be estimated from structural MRI using time-consuming manual tracing or using automated methods. We show that recent improvements to the Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) software's unified segmentation method allow highly accurate and unbiased estimates to be obtained rapidly and without interaction