Unraveling the characteristics of Parkinson's Disease through neuroimaging: Insights and future directions

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease with a high degree of patient heterogeneity, and as of 2016 there are approximately 6.1 million PD patients worldwide. PD has a high proportion of patients with intermediate to advanced disease and a high rate of disability, and clinical diagnosis and treatment are difficult due to the lack of neuromarkers to identify disease states and the inability to quantify the effects of treatment in PD. In recent years, many researchers have explored specific changes in brain activity in PD based on electrophysiological and neuroimaging data. Electroencephalography, with its high temporal resolution and rich frequency domain information, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, with its high spatial resolution, have become the main tools to characterize the state of brain activity in PD in recent years. This paper analyses some of the available data on the characteristics of PD through two neuroimaging techniques commonly used in the disease. It concludes with the prospect of being able to establish uniform criteria for determining PD.