Altered Medial Temporal Lobe Activations in AMCI Subjects During Encoding & Recognition Tasks

Mingwu Jin¹, Victoria Pelak¹, Tim Curran², Rajesh Nandy³, Dietmar Cordes¹

Using a region of interest analysis on fMRI data from three memory paradigms including both encoding and recognition tasks, we investigate the altered functions in twelve subregions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in aMCI subjects. Our results revealed: 1) Significant functional changes occur before significant structural changes; 2) The recognition task using face and occupation stimuli is more sensitive to detect dysfunction in MTL subregions in aMCI; 3) There exists an anti-correlation relationship between fMRI activations and neuropsychological test scores indicating possible compensation during abnormal cognitive decline.