Biometry of the Cerebellar Vermis and Brain Stem in Children: MR Imaging Reference Data from Measurements in 718 Children

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Fig 1.
Illustration of the 2D measurements of the cerebellar vermis and the brain stem. H-V indicates the largest craniocaudal diameter of the vermis; APD-V, the largest anterior-posterior diameter of the vermis passing through the tip of the V4; APD-MP, perpendicular to the major axis of the brain stem passing through the midbrain-pons junction; APD-P, perpendicular to the major axis of the brain stem passing through the middle of the pons.
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Fig 2.
Smoothed curves of the different parameters (H-V, APD-V, APD-P, APD-MP) by age and sex.
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Fig 3.
Reference intervals (third, 50th, 97th) for the different parameters (H-V, APD-V, APD-P, APD-MP). The values of APD-MP are similar in both sexes.

Table 1:

Distribution of the study population by age and sex (n = 718)

Age Class (yr)	Boys (n = 372)	Girls (n = 346)	All (n = 718)
Younger than 1	58	56	114
1–2	37	32	69
2–3	39	28	67
3–4	31	22	53
4–5	27	23	50
5–6	20	21	41
6–7	30	18	48
7–8	17	17	34
8–9	9	16	25
9–10	16	12	28
10–11	10	12	22
11–12	11	14	25
12–13	11	18	29
13–14	13	20	33
14–15	17	19	36
15–16	26	18	44

Table 2:

Indications for brain MR imaging in the study population (n = 718)

Diseases	Prevalence
Epilepsy	123 (17.2%)
Supratentorial, suprasellar, or optic tumors	65 (9%)
Ocular globe pathology	56 (7.7%)
Suspicion of pituitary lesion (staturo-pondéral growth retardation, obesity, and so forth)	55 (7.6%)
Encephalitis, mastoiditis, meningitis, endocarditis, otitis, or empyema	52 (7.3%)
Extracerebral tumor or histiocytosis or blood disease	40 (5.6%)
Cranial trauma	37 (5.2%)
Spinal or medullary pathology, scoliosis, low back pain	36 (5%)
Supratentorial benign lesion (arachnoid cyst, pineal cyst, interhemispheric cyst, and so forth)	32 (4.4%)
Extracerebral or supratentorial vascular malformation	28 (3.9%)
Extracerebral venous-lymphatic malformation	26 (3.6%)
Isolated cervicofacial pathology (cervical mass, velar insufficiency, and so forth)	21 (2.9%)
Cyst or nasal root mass	19 (2.6%)
Headache	15 (2.1%)
Deafness	10 (1.4%)
Others	103 (14.5%)

Table 3:

Equation for estimating reference values for the different parameters^{^a}

↵a With , where T denotes the age, T₁ and T_n denote minimum and maximum ages, respectively, and ρ is a preselected constant for which a suitable value is .01. All measurements needed prior Box-Cox transformation. The values of APD-MP were similar in both sexes.

Table 4:

Inter- and intraobserver agreement for cerebellar vermis and brain stem parameters