Differentiation of Early Alzheimer's Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Cognitively Healthy Elderly Samples Using Multimodal Neuroimaging Indices.

Brain resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC), white matter (WM) integrity, and cortical morphometry, as well as neuropsychological performance, have seldom been studied together to differentiate Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and elderly cognitively healthy comparison (eCHC) samples in the context of the same study. We examined brain rsFC in samples of patients with mild AD ( = 50) and MCI ( = 49) in comparison with eCHC samples ( = 48) and then explored whether rsFC abnormalities can be linked to underlying gray matter (GM) volumetric and/or WM microstructural abnormalities. The mild AD sample showed significantly increased rsFC in the executive control network (ECN) and dorsal attention network (DAN) compared with the eCHC sample, and increased rsFC in ECN compared with MCI.