Fine hippocampal morphology analysis with a multi-dataset cross-sectional study on 2911 subjects

CA1 subfield and subiculum of the hippocampus contain a series of dentate bulges, which are also called hippocampus dentation (HD). There have been several studies demonstrating an association between HD and brain disorders. Such as the number of hippocampal dentation correlates with temporal lobe epilepsy. And epileptic hippocampus have a lower number of dentation compared to contralateral hippocampus. However, most studies rely on subjective assessment by manual searching and counting in HD areas, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive to process large amounts of samples. And to date, only one objective method for quantifying HD has been proposed. Therefore, to fill this gap, we developed an automated and objective method to quantify HD and explore its relationship with neurodegenerative diseases. In this work, we performed a fine-scale morphological characterization of HD in 2911 subjects from four different cohorts of ADNI, PPMI, HCP, and IXI to quantify and explore differences between them in MR T1w images. The results showed that the degree of right hippocampal dentation are lower in patients with Alzheimer's disease than samples in mild cognitive impairment or cognitively normal, whereas this change is not significant in Parkinson's disease progression. The innovation of this paper that we propose a quantitative, robust, and fully automated method. These methodological innovation and corresponding results delineated above constitute the significance and novelty of our study. What’s more, the proposed method breaks through the limitations of manual labeling and is the first to quantitatively measure and compare HD in four different brain populations including thousands of subjects. These findings revealed new morphological patterns in the hippocampal dentation, which can help with subsequent fine-scale hippocampal morphology research.