Abstract #2223

Fractional Anisotropy is Affected by White Matter Lesions in a TBSS Study of Alzheimers Disease

Parnesh Raniga¹, David Raffelt¹, Alan Connelly^2,3, Patricia Desmond⁴, Olivier Salvado¹

¹CSIRO Preventative Health National Research Flagship ICTC, The Australian e-Health Research Centre, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; ²Brain Research Institute, Florey Neuroscience Institutes (Austin), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; ³Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; ⁴Department of Radiology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The impact of concomitant cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) and related white matter hyperintensities (WMH) on the analysis of diffusion tensor imaging indices such as FA has not been fully explored in studies of Alzhimers disease (AD). In this study two groups of subjects with AD; with and without concomitant CAA were compared to normal controls (NC) using the tract based spatial statistics (TBSS) method. On average the groups with concomitant CAA had 15% more voxels that were significantly different from NC where those without CAA. These results suggest that WMH can have a considerable impact on analysis of FA.