Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 19|pp 19701—19710

Voxel-based morphometry focusing on medial temporal lobe structures has a limited capability to detect amyloid β, an Alzheimer’s disease pathology

Masashi Kameyama¹, Kenji Ishibashi², Jun Toyohara², Kei Wagatsuma², Yumi, Umeda-Kameyama³, Keigo Shimoji¹, Kazutomi Kanemaru⁴, Shigeo Murayama⁴, Sumito Ogawa³, Aya M. Tokumaru¹, Kenji Ishii²

¹Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital and Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo 173-0015, Japan
²Research Team for Neuroimaging, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo 173-0015, Japan
³Department of Geriatric Medicine, The University of Tokyo School of Medicine, Tokyo 113-8655, Japan
⁴Department of Neurology, Tokyo Metropolitan Geriatric Hospital and Institute of Gerontology, Tokyo, 113-0015, Japan

* Equal contribution

Received: March 22, 2019Accepted: July 30, 2020Published: October 5, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104012

Copyright: © 2020 Kameyama et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis of nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data allows the identification of medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy and is widely used to assist the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, its reliability in the clinical environment has not yet been confirmed. To determine the credibility of VBM, amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) and VBM studies were compared retrospectively. Patients who underwent Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB) PET were retrospectively recruited. Ninety-seven patients were found to be amyloid negative and 116 were amyloid positive. MTL atrophy in the PiB positive group, as quantified by thin sliced 3D MRI and VBM software, was significantly more severe (p =0.0039) than in the PiB negative group. However, data histogram showed a vast overlap between the two groups. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was 0.646. MMSE scores of patients in the amyloid negative and positive groups were also significantly different (p = 0.0028), and the AUC was 0.672. Thus, MTL atrophy could not reliably differentiate between amyloid positive and negative patients in a clinical setting, possibly due to the wide array of dementia-type diseases that exist other than AD.