Joint Contribution of Structural and Perfusion MR Images for the Classification of Alzheimers Disease

Duygu Tosun¹, Pouria Mojabi¹, Mike W. Weiner¹, Norbert Schuff¹

To determine the joint contribution of structural and arterial spin labeling MR imaging for the classification of Alzheimers disease (AD), we analyzed the cortical thickness and cerebral blood flow (CBF) measures jointly in a cross-sectional study of 24 AD and 38 healthy elderly controls using an integrated multimodality MRI processing framework and a cortical surface-based analysis approach. From the joint analysis, we infer that cortical atrophy dominates prediction of AD while CBF adds no significant value. One interpretation of the results is that CBF is diminished proportionately to brain tissue loss and therefore provides no additional information to structural alterations.