Amy Kuceyeski1, Dieter Meyerhoff2, 3, Timothy Durazzo2, 3, Ashish Raj1
1Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, NY, United States; 2Radiology and Biomedical Engineering, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States; 3Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, United States
In this study, we implement a recently developed measure called the Comparative Connectivity Loss (CCL) that gives the amount of white matter connectivity disruption for a particular gray matter region, and apply it to a group of alcohol-dependent cohorts. We show that the Brain Reward System is preferentially disrupted, without leading to more widespread and global network changes. We also show that the CCL is a more sensitive and specific metric than gray matter atrophy when differentiating between alcohol dependent individuals and non/light drinking controls.