TITLE:
White Matter Changes in Alzheimer’s Disease Revealed by Diffusion Tensor Imaging with TBSS
AUTHORS:
Hongyan Chen, Kai Wang, Jingfan Yao, Jianping Dai, Jun Ma, Shaowu Li, Lin Ai, Qian Chen, Xuzhu Chen, Yumei Zhang
KEYWORDS:
Alzheimer Disease, Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Fractional Anisotropy, TBSS
JOURNAL NAME:
World Journal of Neuroscience,
Vol.5 No.1,
February
5,
2015
ABSTRACT: Alzheimer’s disease (AD)
is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder characterized by impairments in
multiple cognitive domains and it is hard to diagnose in early stage because
it’s not easy to recognize and develop slowly. In this study, we try to
evaluate the difference of white matter between AD and health volunteers using
diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and try to provide some evidence for diagnose AD
in early stage. Twelve elderly Chinese patients with AD and twelve healthy
volunteers were recruited and underwent DTI. The raw diffusion data were dealt
with the toolkit of FSL image post-processing. Fractional anisotrogy (FA) data
were then carried out by using tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS). The
result showed that the FA of cingulum, hippocampus, corticospinal tract, and
inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus significantly reduced in AD patients than
that of volunteers. This indicated that the integrity of white matter tracts in
these regions with AD was disturbed. On the other hand, the FA of other
encephalic regions had no discrepancy compared with that of healthy volunteers.
FA values were found reduced significantly in AD patients, especially in the
posterior of the brain. These findings may provide image methods to diagnose
patients with early stage of AD.