Manoj K. Sarma1,
Margaret Keller2, Linda Chang3, Rajakumar Nagarajan1,
Judy Hayes2, Karin Nielsen-Saines4, David E. Michalik5,
Jaime Deville4, Joseph A. Church6, M. Albert Thomas1
1Radiological
Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United
States; 2Department of Pediatrics, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center,
Torrance, CA, United States; 3Department of Medicine, University
of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, United States; 4Department of
Pediatrics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United
States; 5Department of Infectious disease-Pediatrics, Millers
Childrens Hospital of Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, United States; 6Department
of Pediatrics, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United
States
Neuropathological examinations show white matter (WM) involvement in the brains of HIV-infected patients. In this study we have compared diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) derived fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), axial diffusivity (AD), and radial diffusivity (RD) across a group of perinatally HIV-infected youths and healthy controls. We performed structural DTI for six perinatally HIV-infected youths and five age-matched healthy controls. DTI analysis was done using the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) method. Our findings showed widespread brain regions of declined FA and increased AD values in perinatally HIV infected youths compared to healthy controls. Also we observed a trend of increasing MD and RD in HIV infected youths.