Regional Deficits in Brain Volume in Schizophrenia: A Meta-Analysis of Voxel-Based Morphometry Studies

This review implicates the left superior temporal gyrus and the left medial temporal lobe as key regions of structural difference in patients with schizophrenia, compared to healthy subjects. The diversity of regions reported in voxel-based morphometry studies is in part related to the choice of variables in the automated process, such as smoothing kernel size and linear versus affine transformation, as well as to differences in patient groups. Voxel-based morphometry can be used as an exploratory whole-brain approach to identify abnormal brain regions in schizophrenia, which should then be validated by using region-of-interest analyses.