Abstract
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease with main symptoms of chronic primary memory loss and cognitive impairment. The study aim was to investigate the correlation between intrahippocampal functional connectivity (FC) and MRI radiomic features in AD. A total of 67 AD patients and 44 normal controls (NCs) were enrolled in this study. Using the seed-based method of resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), the whole-brain FC with bilateral hippocampus as seed was performed, and the FC values were extracted from the bilateral hippocampus. We observed that AD patients demonstrated disruptive FC in some brain regions in the left hippocampal functional network, including right gyrus rectus, right anterior cingulate and paracingulate gyri, bilateral precuneus, bilateral angular gyrus, and bilateral middle occipital gyrus. In addition, decreased FC was detected in some brain regions in the right hippocampal functional network, including bilateral anterior cingulate and paracingulate gyri, right dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus. Bilateral hippocampal radiomics features were calculated and selected using the A.K. software. Finally, Pearson’s correlation analyses were conducted between these selected features and the bilateral hippocampal FC values. The results suggested that two gray level run-length matrix (RLM) radiomic features and one gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) radiomic feature weakly associated with FC values in the left hippocampus. However, there were no significant correlations between radiomic features and FC values in the right hippocampus. These findings present that the AD group showed abnormalities in the bilateral hippocampal functional network. This is a prospective study that revealed the weak correlation between the MRI radiomic features and the intrahippocampal FC in AD patients.
Highlights
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease with main symptoms of chronic primary memory loss and cognitive impairment
Our study indicated that the AD group showed abnormalities in the left and right hippocampal functional network compared with the normal controls (NCs) group
In addition to hippocampal structural studies, some rsfMRI studies suggest that hippocampal functional characteristics changed in the AD or amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) stage
Summary
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease with main symptoms of chronic primary memory loss and cognitive impairment. AD has become a public health problem due to its hidden onset, high incidence, and lack of effective drug treatment. The exact cause of AD is still unclear. It is believed some may be related to heredity, neurotransmitter changes, virus infection, immune dysfunction, and free radical damage. The clinical diagnosis of AD is based on cognitive measures and one or more biomarkers including structural MRI, PET, and cerebrospinal fluid analysis of amyloid β or tau proteins (Bruno et al, 2007). Researchers are investigating non-invasive neuroimaging biomarkers for the early diagnosis of AD (Claudia et al, 2010; Yong et al, 2014)
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