Abstract #0725

Gui M, Mastrianni J, Arfanakis K, Solodkin A

The earliest neuropathological changes of AD appear in the entorhinal cortex (EC) and perforant pathway (PP). In this study, Turboprop-DTI was used to detect changes in the diffusion characteristics of EC/PP in patients with AD. It is demonstrated that FA/trace of EC/PP are more sensitive in separating AD patients from normal controls than conventional hippocampus and EC/PP volume measurements. Furthermore, the EC/PP diffusion characteristics for some MCI subjects were similar to those of AD patients. This may indicate that the particular MCI subjects are more probable to develop AD than MCI subjects with normal appearing EC/PP diffusion properties.