Automated MRI measures identify individuals with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease

Desikan, Rahul S.; Cabral, Howard; Hess, Christopher P.; Dillon, William P.; Glastonbury, Christine M.; Weiner, Michael W.; Schmansky, Nicholas J.; Greve, Douglas N.; Salat, David H.; Buckner, Randy L.; Fischl, Bruce

doi:10.1093/brain/awp123

Cited by 354 publications

(304 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Longitudinal cortical thickness measurement has been proposed as a potential bio-marker (Desikan et al, 2009) however the available methods are still under active development. The FreeSurfer longitudinal pipeline was released with version 4.5.0 (Aug 2009), and provides an unbiased methodology whereby the WM and pial surfaces are created on an average volume and deformed to match each timepoint.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of voxel and surface based cortical thickness estimation methods

et al. 2011

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Cortical thickness estimation performed in-vivo via magnetic resonance imaging is an important technique for the diagnosis and understanding of the progression of neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, two different computational paradigms exist, with methods generally classified as either surface or voxel-based. This paper provides a much needed comparison of the surface-based method FreeSurfer and two voxel-based methods using clinical data. We test the effects of computing regional statistics using two different atlases and demonstrate that this makes a significant difference to the cortical thickness results. We assess reproducibility, and show that FreeSurfer has a regional standard deviation of thickness difference on same day scans that is significantly lower than either a Laplacian or Registration based method and discuss the trade off between reproducibility and segmentation accuracy caused by bending energy constraints. We demonstrate that voxel-based methods can detect similar patterns of group-wise differences as well as FreeSurfer in typical applications such as producing group-wise maps of statistically significant thickness change, but that regional statistics can vary between methods. We use a Support Vector Machine to classify patients against controls and did not find statistically significantly different results with voxel based methods compared to FreeSurfer. Finally we assessed longitudinal performance and concluded that currently FreeSurfer provides the most plausible measure of change over time, with further work required for voxel based methods.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of voxel and surface based cortical thickness estimation methods

et al. 2011

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“…The overall process and analysis pipeline has been described elsewhere (http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu). FreeSurfer was evaluated as a reasonable substitute for manual tracing (29) and is commonly used in the studies (21). The analysis outputs were checked by knowledgeable operator.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial navigation impairment is proportional to right hippocampal volume

Nedelská

Andel

Laczó

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

142

104

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Cognitive deficits in older adults attributable to Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology are featured early on by hippocampal impairment. Among these individuals, deterioration in spatial navigation, manifested by poor hippocampus-dependent allocentric navigation, may occur well before the clinical onset of dementia. Our aim was to determine whether allocentric spatial navigation impairment would be proportional to right hippocampal volume loss irrespective of general brain atrophy. We also contrasted the respective spatial navigation scores of the real-space human Morris water maze with its corresponding 2D computer version. We included 42 cognitively impaired patients with either amnestic mild cognitive impairment (n = 23) or mild and moderate AD (n = 19), and 14 cognitively intact older controls. All participants underwent 1.5T MRI brain scanning with subsequent automatic measurement of the total brain and hippocampal (right and left) volumes. Allocentric spatial navigation was tested in the real-space version of the human Morris water maze and in its corresponding computer version. Participants used two navigational cues to locate an invisible goal independent of the start position. We found that smaller right hippocampal volume was associated with poorer navigation performance in both the real-space (β = −0.62, P < 0.001) and virtual (β = −0.43, P = 0.026) versions, controlling for demographic variables, total brain and left hippocampal volumes. In subsequent analyses, the results were significant in cognitively impaired (P ≤ 0.05) but not in cognitively healthy (P > 0.59) subjects. The respective real-space and virtual scores strongly correlated with each other. Our findings indicate that the right hippocampus plays a critical role in allocentric navigation, particularly when cognitive impairment is present.P ersons with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (1, 2) and with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (3), who are known to be at higher risk for developing AD, experience difficulties with spatial navigation. Based on animal research, two basic navigation types were distinguished (4). Egocentric navigation is route or body centered and is dependent mainly on parietal cortices and caudate nucleus (4-8). The more flexible and complex allocentric type is world centered and it is dependent mainly on the hippocampus (5, 9). In humans, medial temporal lobe function is highly lateralized with the right hippocampus predominantly associated with spatial navigation and topographical memory (10). Recent research has underscored the importance of the hippocampus for spatial navigation in cognitively impaired subjects (11,12). For example, a case study of a patient with early AD (13) reported a distinct navigation deficit indicative of hippocampal atrophy. However, structural background of the allocentric navigation impairment has not yet been entirely elucidated, particularly in the real-space environment.The navigation disability in AD and MCI patients has been found to involve selective impairment of spatial cognition as...

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“…Several studies report the use of sophisticated measurement techniques that assess anatomical changes in areas compromised by AD such as the cortical thickness or volumes of subcortical structures (Desikan et al., 2009; Van der Kouwe, Benner, Salat, & Fischl, 2008). The collection of methods that search these anatomical changes or other differences between groups of individual is known as brain morphometry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Characterization of brain anatomical patterns by comparing region intensity distributions: Applications to the description of Alzheimer's disease

et al. 2018

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PurposeThis work presents an automatic characterization of the Alzheimer's disease describing the illness as a multidirectional departure from a baseline defining the control state, being these directions determined by a distance between functional‐equivalent anatomical regions.MethodsAfter a brain parcellation, a region is described by its histogram of gray levels, and the Earth mover's distance establishes how close or far these regions are. The medoid of the control group is set as the reference and any brain is characterized by its set of distances to this medoid.EvaluationThis hypothesis was assessed by separating groups of patients with mild Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment from control subjects, using a subset of the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) database. An additional experiment evaluated the method generalization and consisted in training with the OASIS data and testing with the Minimal Interval Resonance Imaging in Alzheimer's disease (MIRIAD) database.ResultsClassification between controls and patients with AD resulted in an equal error rate of 0.1 (90% of sensitivity and specificity at the same time). The automatic ranking of regions resulting is in strong agreement with those regions described as important in clinical practice. Classification with different databases results in a sensitivity of 85% and a specificity of 91%.ConclusionsThis method automatically finds out a multidimensional expression of the AD, which is directly related to the anatomical changes in specific areas such as the hippocampus, the amygdala, the planum temporale, and thalamus.

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Automated MRI measures identify individuals with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease

Cited by 354 publications

References 48 publications

A comparison of voxel and surface based cortical thickness estimation methods

A comparison of voxel and surface based cortical thickness estimation methods

Spatial navigation impairment is proportional to right hippocampal volume

Characterization of brain anatomical patterns by comparing region intensity distributions: Applications to the description of Alzheimer's disease

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