Visual cortex in macular degeneration (Prins et al. 2016)

This DataverseNL deposit holds the structural brain MRI behind a 2016 PLoS ONE study led by the University Medical Center Groningen with the Universities of Regensburg and York. The study asked whether loss of central vision from macular degeneration goes along with anatomical changes in the visual cortex. It re-analysed a cohort first studied with voxel-based morphometry (Hernowo et al., Cortex 2014), this time with FreeSurfer surface-based measures: cortical thickness, mean curvature, surface area and grey matter volume in anterior and posterior parts of V1 and V2. Patients with juvenile macular degeneration had thinner cortex, smaller surface area and less grey matter in V1 and V2 than their matched controls, while patients with age-related macular degeneration showed thinning in V2 only.

Composition

The cohort has 113 people: 34 with juvenile macular degeneration (mean age 40.2, range 12 to 66), 24 with age-related macular degeneration (mean 75.2, range 52 to 91) and 55 healthy controls with good acuity and no field defects. The controls were split by age into 33 younger controls (mean 37.4, range 13 to 60) and 22 older controls (mean 68, range 61 to 83). Participants were recruited in Groningen, York, London and Regensburg. The deposit contains one zip with 113 T1-weighted volumes as compressed NIfTI and a small CSV that gives each subject's group and age. Sex, scotoma size and disease duration per subject are not in it; the paper reports group means for scotoma diameter and, for Regensburg patients only, disease duration.

Acquisition

All images are T1-weighted at 1 mm isotropic resolution on 3 T scanners. Groningen used a Philips Intera with an 8-channel SENSE head coil and a 3D turbo field echo sequence. The York group scanned on a Siemens Trio at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a multi-average MDEFT sequence. Regensburg used a Siemens Allegra with the ADNI MPRAGE protocol.

Known limitations

No license or reuse terms are published for the data; the repository asks users to contact the data holder first. The paper does not give the number of subjects per site, scanner or sex, and the deposit description lists only the scans and the group labels, with no FreeSurfer outputs or regions of interest.