{"id":16931,"date":"2021-03-30T10:19:26","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T08:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/automated-brain-volumetry-in-alzheimers-disease\/"},"modified":"2025-04-17T12:29:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T10:29:30","slug":"automated-brain-volumetry-in-alzheimers-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/automated-brain-volumetry-in-alzheimers-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"Automated brain volumetry in Alzheimer’s disease"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Alzheimer’s disease<\/h3>\n\n

The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is based on the combination of a series of data collected in the consultation (e.g. progressive cognitive impairment) and the results of various complementary tests (e.g. brain MRI, cerebrospinal fluid analysis, positron emission tomography).<\/p>\n\n

In particular, most patients with Alzheimer’s disease develop progressive brain atrophy with particular involvement of the medial temporal regions, including the hippocampi. In practice, the assessment of the distribution and degree of brain atrophy is usually made visually (qualitatively), which involves a high degree of subjectivity. Research studies have shown that quantitative assessment of brain volume (brain volumetry) is a valid and accurate diagnostic procedure in this context. A significant barrier to the routine use of this technique is that its manual execution requires advanced training and is time consuming. For this reason, in recent years the development of automated brain volumetry methods, which allow these measurements to be obtained in a simple manner and within a reasonable period of time, is being promoted. <\/p>\n\n

In this line, we have developed an automated brain volumetry program (gm_extractor) based on the FSL program, which only requires a brain MRI with T1-weighted sequences. The program will allow us to measure the volumes of several brain regions without the need for further manipulations. To validate the program we used the ADNI database (http:\/\/adni.loni.usc.edu\/), which includes clinical data and imaging studies of a large sample of healthy subjects (controls) and patients with Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment. <\/p>\n\n

Apart from confirming the validity and reliability of the program using several known volumetric measures (e.g., hippocampal volumes), we identified two new measures useful for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease: 1) the ratio between the volumes of posterior and anterior limbic areas and 2) the ratio between the volumes of posterior limbic areas and primary motor, sensory and visual areas. An important advantage of these two measures is that they do not require calculation of the intracranial volume, which reduces the risk of errors due to the normalization process. The average time required to obtain the results on a laptop computer was 16 minutes. <\/p>\n\n

The results of this study were published in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences 378 (2017) 110-119.<\/p>\n\n

The gm_extractor program can be freely downloaded at https:\/\/www.dropbox.com\/sh\/i0j8gpvy5c83m58\/AAAjaGsMNb8LZ5jX3ddrQy1ba?dl=0. To use it you need a computer with the Ubuntu operating system (a Linux distribution) and the FSL program, both available free of charge at https:\/\/ubuntu.com and https:\/\/fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk, respectively.<\/p>\n\n

\"Dr.
AUTHOR: Dr. Adolfo Jim\u00e9nez HueteNeurologist of the Neurology ServiceAdjunct to the Clinical Neurology Program<\/a>Hospital Ruber Internacional of Madrid<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alzheimer’s disease The clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is based on the combination of a series of data collected in the consultation (e.g. progressive cognitive impairment) and the results of various complementary tests (e.g. brain MRI, cerebrospinal fluid analysis, positron emission tomography). In particular, most patients with Alzheimer’s disease develop progressive brain atrophy with particular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569,551,563],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clinical-neurology","category-news-and-current-events","category-recommended-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16932,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16931\/revisions\/16932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neurologiaclinica.es\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}