Abstract #3748

The LoCo: A Measure of Gray Matter Structural Connectivity Loss and Its Application to Neurodegenerative Disorders

Amy Kuceyeski¹, Yu Zhang²,³, Ashish Raj¹

¹Radiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, United States; ²Center for Imaging of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Department of Veteran's Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, CA, United States; ³Radiology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States

We implement a metric called Comparative Connectivity Loss (CCL) that gives the amount of structural white matter connectivity disruption incurred by a gray matter region for a particular pattern of white matter integrity loss. This metric is calculated on a standard atlas for three groups, Alzheimer's disease, fronto-temporal dementia, and age-matched normal controls. We show significant correlations of CCL with atrophy patterns in the two diseases. In addition, we show that the CCL outperforms gray matter atrophy when classifying individuals into the three groups, while having similar levels of accuracy with white matter integrity measures of radial and longitudinal diffusivity.