Double inversion recovery imaging improves the evaluation of gray matter volume losses in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment

Abstract

Our goal was to investigate whether three-dimensional (3D) double inversion recovery (DIR) images can show alterations of gray matter volume (GMV) between Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and nondemented controls and to compare alterations of GMV between groups using DIR images and those using 3D T1-weighted (T1W) images. We included 25 subjects with mild or probable AD, 25 subjects with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 25 elderly cognitively normal (CN) subjects. Group differences in GMV among CN, MCI, and AD patients were tested by voxel-wise, one-way ANOVA. Additional region-of-interest-based comparisons of GMV differences among the three groups for DIR and T1WI were performed using ANCOVA. Finally, ROC curve analysis was performed. In the AD group compared with the CN and MCI groups, GMV was decreased in both DIR and T1W images. However, the areas showing GMV loss were larger in DIR images compared to those in T1W images. Amygdala had the highest area under curve value for both DIR and T1W images. DIR images were sensitive for identifying GMV loss in patients with AD compared with MCI and CN subjects and areas showing GMV loss identified with DIR were extended to more brain areas than those identified with T1W. With DIR, amygdala GMV is the most sensitive in differentiating between subject groups.

Selective impairment of musical emotion recognition in patients with amnesic mild cognitive impairment and mild to moderate Alzheimer disease

“…[34] The prominent feature of AD on the MRI scans was atrophy of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. However, recent studies have reported that the amygdala showed significant gray matter volume loss on double inversion recovery images in the AD group, [35] while Xu et al [36] found changes in the amygdala volume in different stages of aMCI. Taking all of these findings into account, it was not surprising that the patients with AD and aMCI in our study failed to recognize the fearful musical emotion but could identify happy emotion.…”

Synthetic double inversion recovery imaging in brain MRI: Quantitative evaluation and feasibility of synthetic MRI and a comparison with conventional double inversion recovery and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery sequences

“…Redpath et al reported that the DIR sequence improved the contrast between the lesion and background areas by suppressing signals from the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and normal white matter (WM) [1]. DIR has been used to evaluate various lesions in multiple sclerosis, ischemic diseases, epilepsy, tumors, and degenerative diseases [2][3][4][5][6].…”

Predicting the apolipoprotein E ε4 allele carrier status based on gray matter volumes and cognitive function

“…However, different MRI sequences may have different sensitivities and specificities for detecting GMV changes. In this study, we investigated two MRI sequences: three‐dimensional (3D) T1‐weighted (T1W) and 3D double inversion recovery (DIR) (Jahng et al., 2016 ). Although 3D T1W is routinely used to evaluate GMV changes, the 3D DIR sequence has been shown to suppress both cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and white matter signals more effectively than the T1W sequence, which may reduce the partial volume effect and improve the accuracy of GMV quantification (Jahng et al., 2016 ).…”

“…The scan time for the 3D T1W sequence was 4 min and 48 s.The following parameters were used to acquire the 3D DIR images in this study. The first TI of 2930 ms was used to suppress CSF signals, and the second TI of 350 ms was used to suppress white matter signals(Jahng et al, 2016). After applying two inversion pulses, signals were acquired by turbo spin-echo (TSE) imaging(Jahng et al, 2016) with the following imaging parameters: TR/effective TE = 8000/100 ms, echo-spacing = 10.2 ms, echo-train length = 11, overcontiguous slice thickness = 4 mm, reconstructed slice thickness = 2 mm, number of slices = 50, acquisition voxel size = 0.9 × 1.12 × 4, reconstructed voxel size = 0.45 × 0.45 × 2, TSE factor = 43, sensitivity-encoding factor = 2.5, and number of averages = 1.…”