Abstract
The current criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) require the presence of relevant cognitive deficits, so the underlying neuropathological damage is important by the time the diagnosis is made. Therefore, the evaluation of new biomarkers to detect AD in its early stages has become one of the main research focuses. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate a set of texture parameters as potential biomarkers of the disease. To this end, the ALTEA (ALzheimer TExture Analyzer) software tool was created to perform 2D and 3D texture analysis on magnetic resonance images. This intuitive tool was used to analyze textures of circular and spherical regions situated in the right and left hippocampi of a cohort of 105 patients: 35 AD patients, 35 patients with early mild cognitive impairment (EMCI) and 35 cognitively normal (CN) subjects. A total of 25 statistical texture parameters derived from the histogram, the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix and the Gray-Level Run-Length Matrix, were extracted from each region and analyzed statistically to study their predictive capacity. Several textural parameters were statistically significant (p < 0.05) when differentiating AD subjects from CN and EMCI patients, which indicates that texture analysis could help to identify the presence of AD.
Highlights
In 2011, it was estimated that 35.6 million people around the world suffered from dementia, whereas, in 2015, this figure already amounted to 46.8 million
This software tool was developed for visualizing and segmenting magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images, extracting different texture features and evaluating the predictive capacity segmenting MRI images, extracting different texture features and evaluating the predictive capacity of these features to check their viability as possible new biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)
ALTEA was designed in of these features to check their viability as possible new biomarkers of AD
Summary
In 2011, it was estimated that 35.6 million people around the world suffered from dementia, whereas, in 2015, this figure already amounted to 46.8 million. At this rate, it is expected that this figure will almost double by 2030 and more than treble by 2050 [1,2]. Represents the most common type of dementia, accounting for an estimated 60 to 80 percent of cases. This neurodegenerative disorder is characterized by the presence of a progressive deterioration of the cognitive and behavioral functions, mainly in old age [3]. Definitive diagnosis can only be made with histopathological confirmation of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, usually at autopsy [4]
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