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Updated: May 17, 2026
Application of Granger Causality Analysis of the Directed Functional Connection in Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment
Published on: August 7, 2017
Classification of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease using model-based MR and magnetization transfer
1Support Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, University Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Inselspital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Background And Purpose:
Early stratification of degenerative processes is a prerequisite to warrant therapeutic options in prodromal Alzheimer disease. Our aim was to investigate differences in cerebral macromolecular tissue composition between patients with AD, mild cognitive impairment, and age- and sex-matched healthy controls by using model-based magnetization transfer with a binary spin-bath magnetization transfer model and magnetization transfer ratio at 1.5 T.
Materials And Methods:
We investigated patients with de novo AD (n=18), MCI (n=18), and CTRLs (n=18). A region-of-interest analysis of the entorhinal cortex, hippocampal head and body, insula, and temporal neocortex was performed with fuzzy clustering to associate every subregion to a cluster representative for each group.
Results:
Cluster analysis achieved a concordance of 0.92 (50 of 54 subjects) between a combination of the calculated mMT parameters (kf,kr,T2r,F,T2f) in the entorhinal cortex and the neuropsychological diagnosis. The sensitivity and specificity for the discrimination of AD from MCI reached 1 and 0.94, with a positive predictive value of 0.95 and a negative predictive value of 1. Compared with mMT, the concordance for MTR was 0.83 (45 of 54 subjects) with a lower specificity of 0.5 and positive predictive value of 0.67 to discriminate patients with AD and MCI.
Conclusions:
mMT imaging detects macromolecule-related alterations and allows an improved classification of patients with early AD and MCI compared with MTR.
