Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 3, 2026

Abbiategrasso Brain Bank Protocol for Collecting, Processing and Characterizing Aging Brains
Published on: June 3, 2020
Patterns of structural complexity in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia
Karl Young1, An-Tao Du, Joel Kramer
1Department of Radiology, University of California-San Francisco, and VA Medical Center, 4150 Clement Street, San Francisco, CA 94121, USA. karl.young@ucsf.edu
None:
The goal of this project was to utilize an information theoretic formalism for medical image analysis initially proposed in [Young et al. (2005): Phys Rev Lett 94:098701-1] to detect and quantify subtle global and regional differences in spatial patterns in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) by estimating the structural complexity of anatomical brain MRI. The sensitivity and specificity of the results are compared with those of a recent analysis, currently considered state of the art for MR studies of neurodegeneration. The previous study used regional estimates of cortical thinning and/or volume loss to differentiate between normal aging, AD, and FTD. The analysis illustrates that the structural complexity estimation method, a general multivariate approach to the study of variation in brain structure which does not depend on highly specialized volumetric and thickness estimates, is capable of providing sensitive and interpretable diagnostic information.
Related Concept Videos
Alzheimer Disease ll: Pathophysiology
Dementia l: Introduction
Alzheimer Disease l: Introduction
Alzheimer's Disease: Overview
The clinical diagnosis of AD hinges on the presence of memory and other cognitive impairments. Biomarkers, such as changes in Aβ and tau...
Dementia
The progression of dementia is generally gradual.
Amyloid Fibrils
Amyloid deposits were observed as early as 1639 in the liver and the spleen. In 1854, Rudolph Virchow performed iodine staining, normally used to...
