Ventricle shape analysis for centenarians, elderly subjects, MCI and AD patients

  • Authors:

  • Zhaojin Gong;Jianfeng Lu;Jia Chen;Yaping Wang;Yixuan Yuan;Tuo Zhang;Lei Guo;L. Stephen Miller

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science, Nanjing Univ. of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China;School of Computer Science, Nanjing Univ. of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China;School of Computer Science, Nanjing Univ. of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China;School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical Univ., Xi'an, China and Department of Radiology, UNC Chapel Hill;School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical Univ., Xi'an, China;School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical Univ., Xi'an, China;School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical Univ., Xi'an, China;Department of Psychology and Bioimaging Research Center, Univ. of Georgia, Athens, GA

  • Venue:
  • MBIA'11 Proceedings of the First international conference on Multimodal brain image analysis
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this paper, we examined the ventricle shapes of centenarian brains in comparison with those of elderly, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The MRI datasets obtained from Centenarian Study (CS) and the ADNI project are analyzed via the spherical harmonics (SPHARM) shape analysis pipeline. Our results indicate that if the elderly brains are used as comparison baseline, there is no significant difference between centenarian and elderly brains, while the differences between elderly and MCI/AD brains are significant; if the centenarian brains are used as comparison baseline, the differences between centenarian and MCI brains are moderate, but much more significant differences between AD and centenarian brains appear. Further comparisons of volume and shape analysis suggest that ventricle shape characteristics could potentially be a more sensitive biomarker of AD progression than the traditionally assumed ventricle volumes.