Abstract
Spatial heterogeneity in the accumulation of Amyloid-β plaques throughout the brain during asymptomatic as well as clinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) calls for precise localization and quantification of this protein using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging. To address this need, we have developed and evaluated a technique that quantifies the extent of Amyloid-β pathology on a millimeter-by-millimeter scale in the brain with unprecedented precision using data from PET scans. Methods: An inter-modal, and intra-subject registration with information theoretic cost function was utilized to transform all FreeSurfer neuroanatomical labels into PET image space, which were subsequently used to compute regional standardized uptake value ratio (SUVRs). We have evaluated our technique using post-mortem histopathological staining data from 52 older participants as the standard of truth measurement. Results: Our method resulted in consistently and significantly higher SUVRs in comparison to the conventional method in almost all regions of interest. A two-way ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of method as well as a significant interaction effect of method on the relationship between computed SUVR and histopathological staining score. Conclusion: These findings suggest that processing the Amyloid-β PET data in subjects’ native space can improve the accuracy of the computed SUVRs, as they are more closely associated with the histopathological staining data than the results of the conventional approach.
- Neurology
- PET/MRI
- Research Methods
- 18F-Florbetaben PET
- Alzheimers disease
- Amyloid-β
- Free surfer
- Spatial normalization
- Copyright © 2019 by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Inc.