Quantitation of beta-amyloid in transgenic mice using whole slide digital imaging and image analysis software

Abstract

the naturalhistory of small vessel diseases, evaluated in a large cohort of postmortem brains from the Newcastle Institute for Ageing and Health (Newcastle University, UK). This provides a score from 0 to 20 (no to severe vascular burden) and is in good agreement previous neuropathological standards. Nevertheless, the clinical relevance of this score has not yet been evaluated, and this was this study’s aim. Methods: Post mortem AD brains from Lille Neurobank (Lille, France) were scored according this cerebrovascular scale, blinded to clinical and neuroimaging data. Patients had been prospectively followed up with a standardized clinical examination, neuropsychological tests, and structural brain imaging. Correlation with the clinical diagnosis of vascular contribution, age at onset, disease duration, imaging white matter lesions visual scoring scale (Fazekas et al. 1987), vascular risk factors, Mini Mental State Examination score and Dementia Rating Scale score at first visit were analyzed with non-parametric tests. Results: Eleven patients were included. Four of them had a neuropathological cerebrovascular score < 10, all these 4 patients were clinically diagnosed as pure AD. Six of the 7 patients with a score 1⁄4 10 were considered to have no significant cerebrovascular contribution to their dementia. Higher scores were associated with a longer disease duration (p1⁄4 0.05) andtended to be associated with a higher Fazekas score.Conclusions: There is an urgent need to establish a reproducible and standardized quantitative assessment of the cerebrovascular burden in post mortem brains. In this small study, we used an original neuropathological cerebrovascular staging system which seems to be relevant enough to identify the clinical and imaging correlates of the cerebrovascular burden in clinicopathological series. In this limited number of cases, the clinical contribution of cerebrovascular lesions was largely underestimated. Further inclusions are needed to confirm our findings.