Abstract
To estimate regional Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology burden clinically, analysis methods that enable tracking brain amyloid or tau positron emission tomography (PET) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures are needed. We therefore developed a robust MRI analysis method to identify brain regions that correlate linearly with regional amyloid burden in congruent PET images. This method was designed to reduce data variance and improve the sensitivity of the detection of cortical thickness–amyloid correlation by using whole brain modeling, nonlinear image coregistration, and partial volume correction. Using this method, a cross-sectional analysis of 75 tertiary memory clinic AD patients was performed to test our hypothesis that regional amyloid burden and cortical thickness are inversely correlated in medial temporal neocortical regions. Medial temporal cortical thicknesses were not correlated with their regional amyloid burden, whereas cortical thicknesses in the lateral temporal, lateral parietal, and frontal regions were inversely correlated with amyloid burden. This study demonstrates the robustness of our technique combining whole brain modeling, nonlinear image coregistration, and partial volume correction to track the differential correlation between regional amyloid burden and cortical thinning in specific brain regions. This method could be used with amyloid and tau PET to assess corresponding cortical thickness changes.
Highlights
To estimate regional Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology burden clinically, analysis methods that enable tracking brain amyloid or tau positron emission tomography (PET) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures are needed
It is not surprising that multiple studies have tracked MRI cortical changes to cross-sectional and longitudinal PET amyloid burden and assessed the relationship between these factors and cognitive decline[13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28], two key questions related to precise quantification of regional cortical information remain: (1) Is the relationship between PET amyloid burden and cortical thickness linear or nonlinear[13,17] and (2) does this relationship vary across individual cortical regions? To answer these questions, precise measurement of spatially coincident cortical thickness and amyloid is required, for which we have developed improved image processing tools; methodological challenges remain an obstacle to accurate correlation of amyloid and tau PET signal with regional cortical thickness
In this cross-sectional study, we used a novel MRI-PET image processing method to investigate in better detail the cortical thickness as measured by MRI with the corresponding amyloid burden as measured by amyloid PET
Summary
To estimate regional Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology burden clinically, analysis methods that enable tracking brain amyloid or tau positron emission tomography (PET) with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measures are needed. We developed a robust MRI analysis method to identify brain regions that correlate linearly with regional amyloid burden in congruent PET images This method was designed to reduce data variance and improve the sensitivity of the detection of cortical thickness–amyloid correlation by using whole brain modeling, nonlinear image coregistration, and partial volume correction. This study demonstrates the robustness of our technique combining whole brain modeling, nonlinear image coregistration, and partial volume correction to track the differential correlation between regional amyloid burden and cortical thinning in specific brain regions This method could be used with amyloid and tau PET to assess corresponding cortical thickness changes. Cortical thinning is influenced by other factors including a ge[6,7,8], cognitive reserve[9], and stage of disease[10,11,12]
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