Differential Diagnosis of Neurodegenerative Dementias Using Structural MRI

Prashanthi Vemuri¹, Kejal Kantarci¹, Matthew L. Senjem¹, Jeffrey L. Gunter¹, Jennifer L. Whitwell¹, Keith A. Josephs¹, David S. Knopman¹, Bradley F. Boeve¹, Ronald C. Peterson¹, Clifford R. Jack Jr. ¹

We have developed a framework where antemortem structural MRI scans of pathologically confirmed pure cases of each dementia can be used to train an algorithm to recognize the structural abnormalities related to the specific dementia disease process. This knowledge can then be applied to provide differential diagnosis of dementia prospectively for unique individual patients based on the analysis of the subjects structural MRI scan. The proposed system can also be used to determine the relative contribution of several different dementia disease processes underlying the clinical presentation of dementia in an individual subject.