Publications by authors named "D Vaillancourt"

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a clinical diagnosis representing early symptom changes with preserved functional independence. There are multiple potential etiologies of MCI. While often presumed to be related to Alzheimer's disease (AD), other neurodegenerative and non-neurodegenerative causes are common.

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Diffusion MRI (dMRI) has shown significant promise in capturing subtle changes in neural microstructure caused by neurodegenerative disorders. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end compound architecture for processing raw dMRI data. It consists of a 3D convolutional kernel network (CKN) that extracts macro-architectural features across voxels and a gauge equivariant Volterra network (GEVNet) on the sphere that extracts micro-architectural features from within voxels.

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Article Synopsis
  • * The study involved imaging and testing motor function in 24 patients with RBD, 39 with early-stage Parkinson's disease, and 25 control participants, revealing decreased activity in key brain areas for both RBD and Parkinson's disease patients.
  • * Findings showed that both RBD and Parkinson’s patients performed worse on motor tests compared to controls, particularly on a grip task, suggesting early impairments in motor function and brain structure related to RBD and its potential progression to Parkinson's disease.
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Background: Semantic intrusion errors (SIEs) are both sensitive and specific to PET amyloid-β (Aβ) burden in older adults with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI).

Objective: Plasma Aβ biomarkers including the Aβ42/40 ratio using mass spectrometry are expected to become increasingly valuable in clinical settings. Plasma biomarkers are more clinically informative if linked to cognitive deficits that are salient to Alzheimer's disease (AD).

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Neuroimaging and biofluid biomarkers provide a proxy of pathological changes for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and are useful in improving diagnosis and assessing disease progression. However, it is not clear how race/ethnicity and different prevalence of AD risks impact biomarker levels. In this narrative review, we survey studies focusing on comparing biomarker differences between non-Hispanic White American(s) (NHW), African American(s) (AA), Hispanic/Latino American(s) (HLA), and Asian American(s) with normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia.

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