Ontario Neurodegenerative Disease Research Initiative (ONDRI): Structural MRI Methods and Outcome Measures

Joel Ramirez,Stephen C Strother,Fuqiang Gao,Gregory M Szilagyi,Douglas P Munoz,Sandra E Black,Sabrina Adamo,Richard H Swartz,Jane M Lawrence-Dewar,Maged Goubran,Sean Symons,Melissa F Holmes,Stephen R Arnott,Miracle Ozzoude,Derek Beaton,Mario Masellis,Christopher J M Scott,Robert Bartha

doi:10.3389/fneur.2020.00847

Abstract

The Ontario Neurodegenerative Research Initiative (ONDRI) is a 3 years multi-site prospective cohort study that has acquired comprehensive multiple assessment platform data, including 3T structural MRI, from neurodegenerative patients with Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, frontotemporal dementia, and cerebrovascular disease. This heterogeneous cross-section of patients with complex neurodegenerative and neurovascular pathologies pose significant challenges for standard neuroimaging tools. To effectively quantify regional measures of normal and pathological brain tissue volumes, the ONDRI neuroimaging platform implemented a semi-automated MRI processing pipeline that was able to address many of the challenges resulting from this heterogeneity. The purpose of this paper is to serve as a reference and conceptual overview of the comprehensive neuroimaging pipeline used to generate regional brain tissue volumes and neurovascular marker data that will be made publicly available online.

Highlights

The Ontario Neurodegenerative Research Initiative (ONDRI) is a multi-site prospective cohort study following patients with neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Parkinson’s disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and cerebrovascular disease (CVD)
It includes a comprehensive methodological overview of the structural neuroimaging pipeline’s previously published and validated components, with numerous figures to provide a visual description of how the measures were obtained from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), some recommendations for reporting and data analysis, and a brief section providing some basic descriptive statistics to illustrate the whole brain volumetrics that can be obtained from the ONDRI patient cohorts
The novel quantitative method supported by ONDRI provides a volumetric measure of perivascular spaces (PVS). This method has been previously validated with common PVS visual scales and has been used to study AD, normal elderly, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease patients being assessed with sleep polysomnography [72, 76]

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Ontario Neurodegenerative Research Initiative (ONDRI) is a multi-site prospective cohort study following patients with neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Parkinson’s disease (PD), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and cerebrovascular disease (CVD). This paper describes the methods implemented to extract normal and pathological brain tissue volumetric information from the structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provided by the ONDRI neuroimaging platform. It includes a comprehensive methodological overview of the structural neuroimaging pipeline’s previously published and validated components, with numerous figures to provide a visual description of how the measures were obtained from the MRI, some recommendations for reporting and data analysis, and a brief section providing some basic descriptive statistics to illustrate the whole brain volumetrics that can be obtained from the ONDRI patient cohorts. For more information on the ONDRI project, please visit: http://ondri.ca/

Study Participants

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

ETHICS STATEMENT