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Abstract #2223

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

Parnesh Raniga1, David Raffelt1, Alan Connelly2,3, 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.