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Abstract #2315

Voxel Based Analysis of Motor Neurone Disease using Apparent Fibre Density

David Raffelt1,2, Stephen Rose3, J.-Donald Tournier4,5, Robert Henderson6, Stuart Crozier2, Olivier Salvado1, Alan Connelly4,5

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.