Brain region's relative proximity as marker for Alzheimer's disease based on structural MRI

Lene Lillemark Erleben, Lauge Emil Sørensen, Akshay Sadananda Uppinakudru Pai, Erik Bjørnager Dam, Mads Nielsen, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative

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Abstract

BACKGROUND:Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, incurable neurodegenerative disease and the most common type of dementia. It cannot be prevented, cured or drastically slowed, even though AD research has increased in the past 5-10 years. Instead of focusing on the brain volume or on the single brain structures like hippocampus, this paper investigates the relationship and proximity between regions in the brain and uses this information as a novel way of classifying normal control (NC), mild cognitive impaired (MCI), and AD subjects.METHODS:A longitudinal cohort of 528 subjects (170 NC, 240 MCI, and 114 AD) from ADNI at baseline and month 12 was studied. We investigated a marker based on Procrustes aligned center of masses and the percentile surface connectivity between regions. These markers were classified using a linear discriminant analysis in a cross validation setting and compared to whole brain and hippocampus volume.RESULTS:We found that both our markers was able to significantly classify the subjects. The surface connectivity marker showed the best results with an area under the curve (AUC) at 0.877 (p
Original languageEnglish
Article number21
JournalBMC Medical Imaging
Volume14
Issue number1
Number of pages12
ISSN1471-2342
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2014

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