Microstructural grey matter alterations in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Neurology
• Radiology

Background:

• Behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) presents with personality and behavior changes, making early detection and staging difficult.
• Current neuroimaging relies on visual assessment of atrophy, potentially missing subtle, early microstructural changes.
• Volumetric analysis detects neurodegeneration but may lack sensitivity for pre-atrophy microstructural alterations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate autocorrelation-based texture features as biomarkers for early bvFTD detection and disease staging.
• To compare the sensitivity and specificity of texture analysis against regional brain volume.
• To identify brain regions crucial for early diagnosis and disease progression in bvFTD.

Main Methods:

• Structural MRI scans from bvFTD patients (mild and moderate stages) and healthy controls were analyzed.
• Texture and volumetric measures were extracted from frontotemporal regions.
• Analyses were conducted within composite and subregions, with false discovery rate correction applied.

Main Results:

• Texture analysis and volumetric measures revealed significant microstructural abnormalities in mild bvFTD compared to controls.
• In moderate bvFTD, texture features detected alterations in specific regions (e.g., anterior cingulate, insula) even without volumetric differences.
• Texture analysis demonstrated sensitivity to microstructural changes, particularly in regions without detectable atrophy.

Conclusions:

• Texture-based MRI metrics are sensitive to microstructural alterations in bvFTD, detecting changes missed by volumetric analysis.
• Texture analysis shows potential for tracking disease progression and identifying early-stage changes.
• Further longitudinal studies are needed to validate texture features for predicting clinical decline in bvFTD.