Objective: To investigate the dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (dALFFs) in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and healthy controls (HCs) and further explore whether dALFF can be used to test the feasibility of differentiating PD from HCs.Methods: Twenty-eight patients with PD and 28 demographically matched HCs underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) scans and neuropsychological tests. A dynamic method was used to calculate the dALFFs of rs-fMRI data obtained from all subjects. The dALFF alterations were compared between the PD and HC groups, and the correlations between dALFF variability and disease duration/neuropsychological tests were further calculated. Then, the statistical differences in dALFF between both groups were selected as classification features to help distinguish patients with PD from HCs through a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The classifier performance was assessed using a permutation test (repeated 5,000 times).Results: Significantly increased dALFF was detected in the left precuneus in patients with PD compared to HCs, and dALFF variability in this region was positively correlated with disease duration. Our results show that 80.36% (p < 0.001) subjects were correctly classified based on the SVM classifier by using the leave-one-out cross-validation method.Conclusion: Patients with PD exhibited abnormal dynamic brain activity in the left precuneus, and the dALFF variability could distinguish PD from HCs with high accuracy. Our results showed novel insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of PD.

Abstract. The present study aimed to explore the role of texture analysis with apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps based on different regions of interest (ROI) in determining glioma grade. Thirty patients with glioma underwent diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI). ADC values were determined from the following three ROIs: i) whole tumor; ii) solid portion; and iii) peritumoral edema. Texture features were compared between high-grade gliomas (HGGs) and low-grade gliomas (LGGs) using the non-parametric Wilcoxon rank-sum test or the unpaired Student's t-test. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed to determine the optimum threshold for inhomogeneity values in discrimination of HGGs from LGGs. With a spearman rank correlation model, the aforementioned ADC inhomogeneity values were correlated with the Ki-67 labeling index. With whole tumor ROI, inhomogeneity values proved to be significantly different between HGGs and LGGs (P<0.001). With solid portion ROI, inhomogeneity and median values showed significant difference between HGGs and LGGs (P=0.001 and P=0.043, respectively). With peritumoral edema ROI, entropy and edema volume demonstrated positive results (P=0.016, P<0.001). The whole tumor inhomogeneity parameter performed with better diagnostic accuracy (P=0.048) than selecting the solid portion ROI. The association between inhomogeneity and Ki-67 labeling index was significantly positive in whole tumor and solid portion ROI (R=0.628, P<0.001 and R=0.470, P=0.009). Texture analysis of DWI based on different ROI can provide various significant parameters to evaluate tumor heterogeneity, which were correlated with tumor grade. Particularly, the inhomogeneity value derived from whole tumor ROI provided high diagnostic value and predicting the status of tumor proliferation. IntroductionGliomas are the most common type of primary brain tumor. The World Health Organization (WHO) classifies gliomas into grades I-IV, where I and II are low-grade gliomas (LGGs) and III and IV are high-grade gliomas (HGGs) (1). Determining the correct grade of the tumor is of great importance as it dictates the management and prognosis for the patient (2). HGGs are managed with radical resection and with adjuvant radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy, whereas LGGs are very slow growing and can undergo curative resection and have considerably better prognosis (3). The current gold standard for grading gliomas is histopathological assessment by stereotactic brain biopsy, which is an invasive procedure. Particularly with gliomas, the potential to increase clinical utility of imaging as a non-invasive technique to accurately ascertain tumor grade is gaining a lot of attention (4).Advanced MR imaging techniques such as diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and its estimated apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) can probe the pathological changes in glioma providing abundant important information that is not apparent on conventional imaging (5-7). ADC, which reflects the volume of the extracellular water compartment, is sensitive ...

Objective To assess segmental liver stiffness (LS) with MRI before and after endovascular intervention in patients with Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS). Materials and Methods Twenty-three patients (13 males and 10 females; mean age, 42.6 ± 12.6 years; age range, 31–56 years) with BCS as a primary liver disease were recruited for this study. Two consecutive magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) examinations were performed before the endovascular treatment. Fifteen patients who underwent endovascular intervention treatment also had follow-up MRE scans within three days after the procedure. LS was measured in three liver segments: the right posterior, right anterior, and left medial segments. Inter-reader and inter-exam repeatability were analyzed with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and Bland-Altman analysis. Segmental LS and clinical characteristics before and after the intervention were also compared. Results Within three days of the endovascular intervention, all three segmental LS values decreased: LS of the right posterior segment = 7.23 ± 0.88 kPa (before) vs. 4.94 ± 0.84 kPa (after), LS of the right anterior segment = 7.30 ± 1.06 kPa (before) vs. 4.77 ± 0.85 kPa (after), and LS of the left medial segment = 7.22 ± 0.87 kPa (before) vs. 4.87 ± 0.72 kPa (after) (all p = 0.001). There was a significant correlation between LS changes and venous pressure gradient changes before and after treatments (r = 0.651, p = 0.009). The clinical manifestations of all 15 patients significantly improved after therapy. The MRE repeatability was excellent, with insignificant variations (inter-reader, ICC = 0.839–0.943: inter-examination, ICC = 0.765–0.869). Bland-Altman analysis confirmed excellent agreement (limits of agreement, 13.4–19.4%). Conclusion Segmental LS measured by MRE is a promising repeatable quantitative biomarker for monitoring the treatment response to minimally invasive endovascular intervention in patients with BCS.

Background: Accurate and non-invasive assessment of intracranial atherosclerotic disease (ICAD) is important because of its effect on treatment planning. The aim of this study is to investigate if zero echo time (zTE) magnetic resonance angiography (zTE-MRA) is feasible in the characterization of ICAD.Methods: A total of 175 patients with ICAD were recruited. ZTE-MRA and time-of-flight (TOF)-MRA sequences were conducted for all participants using a 3T clinical MR system. Forty-one patients also underwent digital subtraction angiography (DSA), and were confirmed to have intracranial arterial stenosis (ICAS). Weighted kappa (κ) statistics were used to assess the inter-observer agreement and diagnostic consistency of both zTE-and TOF-MRA, using DSA as a reference. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to evaluate differences in image quality between zTE-and TOF-MRA images. The nonparametric test of multiple paired samples was used to compare the results of vascular stenosis diagnosis between zTE-, TOF-MRA and DSA.Results: Supported by high inter-observer agreement (weighted κ=0.78), zTE-MRA generated significantly higher scores than TOF-MRA for susceptibility artifact signal (mean: 3.03±0.98 vs. 2.72±1.09; P=0.017) and flow signal in parent artery (mean: 3.63±0.49 vs. 3.07±0.82; P<0.001). Additionally, zTE-MRA showed more robust diagnostic performance than TOF-MRA for patients with ICAD and degree of vascular stenosis (P<0.05), and was highly consistent with reference DSA images (weighted κ=0.80).Conclusions: ZTE-MRA has potential for use as a routine clinical method for patients with ICAD.

No abstract