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Abstract #4121

Correlating White Matter Integrity Loss & Gray Matter Atrophy in Alzheimer's Disease

Amy Kuceyeski1, Yu Zhang2,3, Ashish Raj1

1Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, United States; 2Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, VA Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, United States; 3Radiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States


Alzheimers disease (AD) is characterized as neuronal death primarily affecting the brains gray matter (GM). However, recent evidence shows altered white matter (WM) integrity in early AD and in asymptomatic people with genetic predispositions for AD. We propose a computational methodology that utilizes structural and diffusion image data of healthy and AD brains to identify correlations between WM loss and GM atrophy in AD patients. GM regions identified with our method agree with clinical knowledge of the progression of AD, and, more convincingly, our prediction correlates highly with observed atrophy in AD patients.