Identify the Atrophy of Alzheimer's Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment and Normal Aging Using Morphometric MRI Analysis.
Quantitatively assessing the medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures atrophy is vital for early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and accurately tracking of the disease progression. Morphometry characteristics such as gray matter volume (GMV) and cortical thickness have been proved to be valuable measurements of brain atrophy. In this study, we proposed a morphometric MRI analysis based method to explore the cross-sectional differences and longitudinal changes of GMV and cortical thickness in patients with AD, MCI (mild cognitive impairment) and the normal elderly. High resolution 3D MRI data was obtained from ADNI database. SPM8 plus DARTEL was carried out for data preprocessing. Two kinds ofz-score map were calculated to, respectively, reflect the GMV and cortical thickness decline compared with age-matched normal control database. A volume of interest (VOI) covering MTL structures was defined by group comparison. Within this VOI, GMV, and cortical thickness decline indicators were, respectively, defined as the mean of the negativez-scores and the sum of the normalized negativez-scores of the correspondingz-score map. Kruskal-Wallis test was applied to statistically identify group wise differences of the indicators. Support vector machines (SVM) based prediction was performed with a leave-one-out cross-validation design to evaluate the predictive accuracies of the indicators. Linear least squares estimation was utilized to assess the changing rate of the indicators for the three groups. Cross-sectional comparison of the baseline decline indicators revealed that the GMV and cortical thickness decline were more serious from NC, MCI to AD, with statistic significance. Using a multi-region based SVM model with the two indicators, the discrimination accuracy between AD and NC, MCI and NC, AD and MCI was 92.7, 91.7, and 78.4%, respectively. For three-way prediction, the accuracy was 74.6%. Furthermore, the proposed two indicators could also identify the atrophy rate differences among the three groups in longitudinal analysis. The proposed method could serve as an automatic and time-sparing approach for early diagnosis and tracking the progression of AD.
School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University Beijing, China.
Xiangyu
X
Ma
School of Chinese Medicine, Capital Medical University Beijing, China.
Zhaoxia
Z
Li
School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University Beijing, China.
Bin
B
Jing
School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University Beijing, China.
Han
H
Liu
College of Software Engineering, Beijing University of Technology Beijing, China.
Dan
D
Li
School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University Beijing, China.
Haiyun
H
Li
Alzheimer’s disease; MRI; atrophy indicator; cortical thickness; gray matter volume; medial temporal lobe; morphometric analysis