Parastou Foroutan1, 2, Melissa M. Murray3, Shinsuke Fujioka4, Katherine J. Schweitzer4, Dennis W. Dickson3, Zbigniew K. Wszolek4, Samuel Colles Grant1, 5
1Center for Interdisciplinary Magnetic Resonance, The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Tallahassee, FL, United States; 2Imaging, The H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, FL, United States; 3Pathology and Neuroscience, The Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, United States; 4Neurology, The Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, United States; 5Chemical & Biomedical Engineering, The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, United States
The two most common forms of dementia are Alzheimers disease (AD) and diffuse Lewy Body disorder (DLBD), but clinical similarities make it difficult to distinguish between them. In this study, fixed postmortem sections of human hippocampi diagnosed with AD and DLBD were evaluated using MRI at 21.1 T. The samples were analyzed using high resolution 3D datasets, diffusion-weighted imaging and relaxation maps of T2 and T2* compared to histology to identify MR biomarkers specific to the different pathologies. Data suggests that lower T2 and T2* times are correlated with chronic DLBD while increased relaxation and ADC coincide with chronic AD.