Abstract #1198

Normalization of FMRI Signal Improves Group Differentiation in Alzheimers Disease

Uma Yezhuvath¹, Jinsoo Uh¹, Feng Xu¹, Rani Varghese¹, Kelly Lewis-Amezcua¹, Kristin Martin-Cook², Myron Weiner², Hanzhang Lu¹

¹Advanced Imaging Research Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA; ²Alzheimers Disease Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA

BOLD fMRI provides a valuable tool to study neural differences between diseased and healthy groups. However, the BOLD signal is influenced by various physiologic modulators, the effect of which needs to be factored out in order to correctly quantify the neural activity. Here, we conducted a visual memory task in alzheimers disease patients and normal controls. We applied two normalization techniques to the BOLD signal to remove the effects of baseline venous oxygenation and cerebrovascular reactivity. We find that the BOLD signal after normalization is better at group differentiation and shows better correlation with post-MRI memory scores.