Can measuring hippocampal atrophy with a fully automatic method be substantially less noisy than manual segmentation over both 1 and 3 years?

Hippocampal atrophy is the amount of shrinkage of the hippocampus from one time point to the next. It can be measured with noninvasive MRI and is a widely validated surrogate outcome for Alzheimer's disease (AD) trials (Frisoni et al., 2010). It has been shown to be one of the first observable characteristics of AD (Bobinski et al., 1996). It also accelerates before the translation to clinical dementia (Jack et al., 2011) as part of the AD pathology cascade (Jack et al., 2010). Analysis of the images from the ADNI1 study found the median annualized atrophy rates were 1.5% (healthy controls (HC)), 2.4% (mildly cognitively impaired (MCI)) and 5.1% (AD) (Cover et al., 2016).

Source: Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging - August 9, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Keith S. Cover, Ronald A. van Schijndel, Paolo Bosco, Soheil Damangir, Alberto Redolfi, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, neuGRID Source Type: research