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Alzheimer's Imaging Consortium

  • 0University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
Alzheimer's & Dementia : the Journal of the Alzheimer's Association +

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December 23, 2025

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December 23, 2025

View abstract on PubMed

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

We developed purple-mri, a novel package for analyzing postmortem brain MRI, revealing stronger associations between brain thickness and Alzheimer's disease pathology than antemortem scans.

Area Of Science

  • Neuroimaging
  • Neuropathology
  • Medical Image Analysis

Background

  • Postmortem MRI offers ultra-high resolution for detailed brain structure analysis, surpassing in vivo MRI capabilities.
  • Existing methods lack comprehensive tools for postmortem MRI segmentation, parcellation, and normalization.
  • A unified framework is needed to link postmortem morphometry and histopathology.

Purpose Of The Study

  • Introduce purple-mri, a novel software package for postmortem MRI analysis.
  • Develop a framework for point-wise, surface-based group studies on postmortem MRI data.
  • Enable the correlation of morphometric data with histopathological findings in a common coordinate system.

Main Methods

  • Developed a joint voxel- and surface-based pipeline integrating deep learning and classical techniques for accurate postmortem cerebral hemisphere parcellation.
  • Implemented deformable image registration to align postmortem and antemortem MRI data.
  • Performed point-wise analysis correlating cortical thickness with tau and neuronal loss in Alzheimer's disease continuum cases.

Main Results

  • The purple-mri package successfully parcellates postmortem brain hemispheres, handling low contrast, artifacts, and atrophy.
  • Registration pipeline achieves one-to-one correspondence between ante- and postmortem MRI modalities.
  • Postmortem MRI revealed significantly stronger associations between cortical thickness and Alzheimer's disease pathology (tau, neuronal loss) compared to antemortem MRI.

Conclusions

  • Purple-mri facilitates large-scale postmortem MRI analysis, enabling detailed neuropathological studies.
  • The enhanced sensitivity of postmortem MRI in detecting thickness-pathology relationships can inform the development of more precise in vivo biomarkers.
  • Mapping postmortem findings to antemortem MRI in a common coordinate system provides a powerful approach for understanding neurodegenerative diseases.

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