Enrico De Vita1,2, Basil H. Ridha3,
Nick C. Fox3, John S. Thornton1,2, H. R. Jager1,2
1Lysholm Department of
Neuroradiology, National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery, London,
United Kingdom; 2Academic Neuroradiological Unit, Department of
Brain Repair & Rehabilitation, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United
Kingdom; 3Dementia Research Centre, Department of Neurodegenerative
Diseases, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom
Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) has been used widely to study Alzheimers disease (AD). Whilst most studies, employ standard diffusion-weighting, typically b~1000s/mm2, in several disease groups, higher diffusion-weightings (e.g. b~3000s/mm2), show an increased pathological-sensitivity. The few studies using high-b-values in AD employed region of interest or whole-brain histogram analyses. We performed voxel based analysis (VBA) to investigate the relative pathological sensitivity of high- and standard-b-value DWI over the whole brain and compared the results with voxel-based morphometry in an AD cohort. Conventional and high-b approaches gave comparable results suggesting there may be little advantage in using high-b DWI in AD.