Abstract #2315

Voxel Based Analysis of Motor Neurone Disease using Apparent Fibre Density

David Raffelt^1,2, Stephen Rose³, J.-Donald Tournier^4,5, Robert Henderson⁶, Stuart Crozier², Olivier Salvado¹, Alan Connelly^4,5

¹The Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ²Biomedical Engineering, School of ITEE, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ³Centre for Advanced Imaging, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ⁴Brain Research Institute, Florey Neuroscience Institutes (Austin), Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ⁵Department of Medicine, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; ⁶Department of Neurology, Royal Brisbane & Women's Hospital, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Motor Neurone Disease (MND) involves progressive degeneration of the motor neurons and is typically fatal within 2-5 years; consequently there is considerable need for neuroimaging biomarkers to aid prognosis and pharmaceutical development. In this work we demonstrate the use of a recently developed measure called Apparent Fibre Density (AFD) to detect differences in MND within pathways related to the motor cortex. In addition to corroborating previous findings in MND, this study demonstrates the clear advantage of using AFD analysis in the context of multiple fibre orientations, by identifying not only the location, but also the orientations along which differences exist.