HIPS-THOMAS outperforms FreeSurfer for automated thalamic nuclear segmentation on structural MRI

In healthy adults and autoimmune limbic encephalitis patients, the HIPS-THOMAS method surpassed standard FreeSurfer segmentation for delineating thalamic nuclei. Standard FreeSurfer also underperformed in distinguishing patients from controls based on affected anteroventral and…

• In comparisons against two thalamic atlases using two healthy cohorts and one patient cohort, HIPS-THOMAS outperformed both the standard FreeSurfer segmentation and its newer diffusion-based update.
• The diffusion-based update to FreeSurfer showed improvements limited to only a few nuclei.
• Standard FreeSurfer segmentation underperformed in distinguishing patients with chronic autoimmune limbic encephalitis from healthy controls based on anteroventral and pulvinar nuclei measures.

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