Abstract #0614

Free-Water Correction Reveals Wide Spread Differences Between Stable and Converting MCI Subjects

Klaus Hermann Fritzsche¹,², Carl-Fredrik Westin¹, Hans-Peter Meinzer², Bram Stieltjes³, Ofer Pasternak¹

¹Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; ²Medical and Biological Informatics, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, BW, Germany; ³Quantitative imaging based disease characterization, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, BW, Germany

We applied the diffusion MRI free-water elimination (FWE) technique to compare a group of MCI patients that converted to AD with a group of patients that remain stable MCI. We find that FWE increases the sensitivity of recognizing very early abnormalities related to the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Further more, with the additional information in the FWE model we were able to classify these alterations as being microstructural as opposed to atrophic or macroscopic in their nature.