Improved Methods of Biomarker Detection in PET and MRI Studies of Alzheimer’s Disease

• Activity Number: 382 - Imaging and Clinical Biomarkers in Neurodegenerative Disease
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 10, 2022 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Imaging
• Author(s): Dana L Tudorascu* and James Wilson
• Companies: University of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh
• Keywords: biomarkers; Alzheimer's; gray matter; PET; MRI; atrophy

Abstract

Biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) such as gray matter volume, white matter hyperintensities, amyloid and tau are derived from Neuroimaging studies including MRI and PET. There are many challenges in accurately quantifying these biomarkers including technical (i.e., different scanners) as well as clinical manifestation of AD (i.e., atrophy) that require new or improved statistical methods for their quantification. In this work, we present improved statistical methods to address both, technical and clinical challenges. These improvements will be presented on a neuroimaging dataset that includes MRI and PET outcomes from AD studies at our institution.