Manisha Aggarwal1,
Susumu Mori1, Michael I. Miller2, Wenzhen Duan3,
Jiangyang Zhang1
1Department of
Radiology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA; 2Center
for Imaging Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA; 3Department
of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD,
USA
Huntington's disease (HD) is a fatal neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive brain atrophy. Longitudinal studies in mouse models of HD are therefore important to understand the spatiotemporal progression of brain atrophy in order to identify windows for therapeutic intervention. In this study, longitudinal analysis of deformation based morphometry (DBM) metrics is used to analyze three dimensional in vivo MR images of the R6/2 model of HD from 3 to 12 weeks of age. Longitudinal analysis of DBM-derived metrics enabled elucidation of the growth patterns of wild-type brain development and the spatiotemporal patterns of progressive atrophy in the R6/2 HD brains.