Integrating longitudinal information in hippocampal volume measurements for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Structural MRI measures for monitoring Alzheimer's Disease (AD) progression are becoming instrumental in the clinical practice, and more so in the context of longitudinal studies. This investigation addresses the impact of four image analysis approaches on the longitudinal performance of the hippocampal volume.

Methods: We present a hippocampal segmentation algorithm and validate it on a gold-standard manual tracing database.

Automatic temporal lobe atrophy assessment in prodromal AD: Data from the DESCRIPA study.

Background: In the framework of the clinical validation of research tools, this investigation presents a validation study of an automatic medial temporal lobe atrophy measure that is applied to a naturalistic population sampled from memory clinic patients across Europe.

Methods: The procedure was developed on 1.5-T magnetic resonance images from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database, and it was validated on an independent data set coming from the DESCRIPA study.

Local MRI analysis approach in the diagnosis of early and prodromal Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy is one of the key biomarkers to detect early neurodegenerative changes in the course of Alzheimer's disease (AD). There is active research aimed at identifying automated methodologies able to extract accurate classification indexes from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (MRI). Such indexes should be fit for identifying AD patients as early as possible.

Automatic analysis of medial temporal lobe atrophy from structural MRIs for the early assessment of Alzheimer disease.

The purpose of this study is to develop a software for the extraction of the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions from T1-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images with no interactive input from the user, to introduce a novel statistical indicator, computed on the intensities in the automatically extracted MTL regions, which measures atrophy, and to evaluate the accuracy of the newly developed intensity-based measure of MTL atrophy to (a) distinguish between patients with Alzheimer disease (AD), patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and elderly controls by using established criteria for patients with AD and aMCI as the reference standard and (b) infer about the clinical outcome of aMCI patients. For the development of the software, the study included 61 patients with mild AD (17 men, 44 women; mean age +/- standard deviation (SD), 75.8 years +/- 7.