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Investigating the Medial Temporal Lobe in Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment, with Turboprop Diffusion Tensor Imaging, MRI-volumetry, and T 2-relaxometry

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Abstract

The first neuropathological alterations in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) occur in the medial temporal lobes (MTLs), in the entorhinal cortex (EC), perforant pathway (PP), and hippocampus. The purpose of this study was to investigate the microstructural integrity, size, and T 2-relaxation times of MTL structures in patients with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), using MRI techniques that are immune to magnetic field inhomogeneities. Turboprop-DTI and high-resolution anatomical MRI data were obtained on AD and MCI patients, and healthy controls. Significant AD-related changes were detected in more MTL structures of AD patients by means of Turboprop-DTI than with any other technique used. Mean diffusivity and T 2-relaxation times of specific MTL structures increased in both the MCI and AD cohorts when compared to normal controls. Therefore, Turboprop-DTI and T 2-relaxometry may be valuable non-invasive tools in the investigation of the early AD-related neuropathological alterations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a grant from the Alzheimer’s Association to Dr Arfanakis. JDC is partially supported by Emory University. The authors would like to thank Drs A. Solodkin and J. Mastrianni for recruitment of patients.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 West 32nd Street, E1-116, Chicago, IL, 60616, USA

    Konstantinos Arfanakis, Minzhi Gui & Ashish A. Tamhane

  2. Brain Research Imaging Center, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Konstantinos Arfanakis

  3. Departments of Biostatistics and Radiology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    John D. Carew

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  1. Konstantinos Arfanakis
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  2. Minzhi Gui
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Correspondence to Konstantinos Arfanakis.

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Arfanakis, K., Gui, M., Tamhane, A.A. et al. Investigating the Medial Temporal Lobe in Alzheimer’s Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment, with Turboprop Diffusion Tensor Imaging, MRI-volumetry, and T 2-relaxometry. Brain Imaging and Behavior 1, 11–21 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-007-9001-4

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