Biomarkers

Medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy measured on MRI is a sensitive biomarker of AD-linked neurodegeneration but is not specific to AD. LATE is a common AD co-pathology that is challenging to distinguish from AD based on available validated biomarkers. LATE and AD are both associated with hippocampus and entorhinal cortex atrophy, but recent studies suggest that there are differences in the severity and spatial patterns of atrophy. We sought to use postmortem MRI and histology to examine how MRI morphometric measures in AD and LATE relate to direct measures of neurodegeneration, including neuron number, size, and density.

Thionin-stained 50µm histology sections from 24 brain donors (5 AD-LATE-, 14 AD+LATE-, 5 AD+LATE+) with available 9.4T postmortem MRI were used to delineate subfields CA1, subiculum and entorhinal cortex. Deep learning method StarDist was used to detect star-shaped objects in thionine slides, combined with weakly-supervised learning to identify artifact-free cortical regions and Gaussian mixture modeling to distinguish neurons from glia (Figure 1AB). Validation against stereology measures of neuronal/glial density was performed in 50 separate regions. Neuronal measures were compared to MTL volume and thickness measures extracted from MRI.

Automated neuronal density estimates (r=0.72, Figure 1C) agreed with stereology, but not glial density. Estimated number and size of neurons in CA1 and ERC were higher in individuals with less CA1/ERC atrophy (Figure 2) consistent with greater neuronal loss in advanced AD and LATE. However, CA1 neuronal and glial density, and ERC glial density, were higher in individuals with greater atrophy, suggesting tighter packing of neurons in remaining tissue and significant contribution of neuropil loss to MRI-based atrophy measures. Pointwise analysis in Figure 3 shows patterns of association between regional MTL thickness and CA1 neuronal count, size, and density measures.

These initial feasibility results in two sections in 24 brain donors encourage us to apply this pipeline to a larger dataset of paired postmortem MRI and serial histology sections (Ravikumar et al., 2024) and to study associations between tau pathology, neuronal loss, and MRI-based measures of atrophy, with the aim of better differentiating atrophy linked to LATE and AD.