title: Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using a grid implementation of statistical parametric mapping analysis.
abstract: A quantitative statistical analysis of perfusional medical images may provide powerful support to the early diagnosis for Alzheimer's Disease (AD). A Statistical Parametric Mapping algorithm (SPM), based on the comparison of the candidate with normal cases, has been validated by the neurological research community to quantify ipometabolic patterns in brain PET/SPECT studies. Since suitable "normal patient" PET/SPECT images are rare and usually sparse and scattered across hospitals and research institutions, the Data Grid distributed analysis paradigm ("move code rather than input data") is well suited for implementing a remote statistical analysis use case, described in the present paper. Different Grid environments (LCG, AliEn) and their services have been used to implement the above-described use case and tackle the challenging problems related to the SPM-based early AD diagnosis.
authors.affiliation: Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Torino, Torino, Italy.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bagnasco
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Beltrame
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Canesi
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Castiglioni
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cerello
authors.forename: S C
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Cheran
authors.forename: M C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Gilardi
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lopez Torres
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Molinari
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Schenone
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Torterolo
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000175:diagnosis*; D001921:Brain / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D042241:Early Diagnosis; D006801:Humans; D049268:Positron-Emission Tomography; D011859:Radiography; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D015899:Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon