NAGAOKA TakashiDepartment of Computational Systems Biology Associate Professor |
In Alzheimer's disease (AD) amyloid-β (Aβ) depositions disturbs neurons irreversibly, and early treatment before occurrence of dementia is important for AD treatments. This study aims at proposing an automated delineation algorithm for reference regions (AutoRef) for Aβ accumulation quantification. This presentation focuses on merits of a limited temporal information and the increased number clusters. As a result, for 86 clinical data (43 cases of AD, 33 cases of normal and 10 cases of equivocal deposition of Aβ), AutoRef succeeded in delineating the reference region for all the data. There was no significant difference (p < 0.05) between AutoRef and manually delineated reference region by a physician. The standard deviation of the difference between them was smaller than the discrimination threshold of AD used in actual clinical practice. In conclusions, the effectiveness of this study was suggested.
A deposit of amyloid β (Aβ) to the central nervous system causes Alzheimer's disease (AD). A periodical evaluation on Aβ, a year, can therefor detect the beginning of AD, and it realizes an effective medical treatment for AD. For quantitative measurement of Aβ deposit is available using PET, and it requires to delineate the cerebellum gray matter as a reference region, when no Aβ deposit occurs physiologically and it has complicated shape. This study aim at proposing automated delineation algorithm based on a kinetics of administered PET tracer for Aβ imaging. The validation using a clinical data presented no significant difference (p < 0.05) between the amount of Aβ deposit using an ordinary manual delineation and the automated method. We can conclude that the algorithm is clinically useful.