Ventricular shape biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease in clinical MR images.

The aim of this work was to identify ventricular shape-based biomarkers in MR images to discriminate between patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy elderly. Clinical MR images were collected for 58 patients and 28 age-matched healthy controls. After normalizing all the images the ventricular cerebrospinal fluid was semiautomatically extracted for each subject and an innovative technique for fully automatic shape modeling was applied to generate comparable meshes of all ventricles.

MMSE scores correlate with local ventricular enlargement in the spectrum from cognitively normal to Alzheimer disease.

In this work, we aimed at correlating focal atrophy in periventricular structures with cognitive function, in the spectrum from healthy subjects to severe Alzheimer disease: 28 subjects with normal cognition and 84 patients presenting various degrees of cognitive impairment were included in the study. The cognitive level of each subject was assessed with the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Atrophy in periventricular structures was inferred by modeling and analyzing local shape variations of brain ventricles: for a given subject, we distinguished between the severity of atrophy, estimated as local enlargement (in mm) of the ventricular surface relative to an average normal subject, and the extent of atrophy, defined as the percentage of the ventricular surface (global or per anatomical region) significantly different from an average control.