Viability of AMURA biomarkers from single-shell diffusion MRI in Migraine Clinical Studies

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is the most employed method to assess white matter properties using quantitative parameters derived from diffusion MRI, but it presents known limitations that restricts the evaluation of complex structures. The objective of this study was the assessment of complementary diffusion measures extracted with a novel approach, Apparent Measures Using Reduced Acquisitions (AMURA), in comparison with DTI in clinical studies. Fifty healthy controls, 51 episodic migraine and 56 chronic migraine patients underwent single-shell diffusion MRI. Three DTI-based and eight AMURA-based parameters were compared between groups with tract-based spatial statistics. On the other hand, following a region-based analysis, the measures were assessed for multiple subsamples with diverse reduced sample sizes and their stability was evaluated with the coefficient of quartile variation. Compared to DTI, statistically significant differences in additional regions and group comparisons were found with AMURA-based measures. Additionally, some AMURA-based measures showed a remarkable discriminative power for quite reduced sample size and, simultaneously, lower stability (higher coefficient of quartile variation) than DTI-based measures. These findings suggest that AMURA presents favorable characteristics to identify differences of specific microstructural properties between clinical groups in regions with complex fiber architecture and lower dependency on the sample size or assessing technique than DTI.