Analysis Of Gray Matter In AD Patients And MCI Subjects Based On Voxel-Based Morphometry

Cognitive dysfunction refers abnormal brain’s advanced intelligent processing related to learning memory as well as critical thinking, leading human learning disorders, memory disorders, also accompanied by aphasia, apraxia, agnosia and loss of other complex series of pathological processes. Alzheimer’s Disease is one of the cognitive dysfunction diseases which is common in elder. The incidence of this disease increases almost in an exponential manner with age. The clinical features are the degeneration of the cognitive function, the memory loss, communication difficulty and the change of personality and so on. The main changes in pathology are the cortical atrophy, the loss of neuron and neurofibrillary tangles. Because the course of this disease is irreversible and the clinical diagnosis is often hysteretic so more and more researchers has been interested in the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to hope for the realization of early detection and prevention. MCI is a disease which mainly has the decline of cognitive function and memory but the degree is light. MCI is commonly considered as the transition stage between the normal aging and AD. Besides the memory damage, other symptoms such as the attention diffuse deficit, the decline of using language and the decline of reasoning function and so on, have disturbed the daily life of MCI subjects seriously. So the combined study in MCI and AD has the important significance to relieve the pain and avoid the further deterioration of this disease.In this paper, we use voxel-based morphology to analyze brain magnetic resonance imaging data of normal healthy elderly population, the population of patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease patient population. And we found the abnormal changes of the cerebral cortex gray matter volume in patients with mild cognitive impairment and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The detailed works of this paper are as follows:(I) Compared with normal healthy elderly population, Alzheimer’s disease groups showed significant atrophy of gray matter volume in following regions:bilateral parahippocampal gyrus, bilateral hippocampus, left amygdala, left fusiform, left orbital-frontal gyrus, bilateral olfactory and left temporal gyrus;(2) The population of patients, with mild cognitive impairment revealed significant atrophy in bilateral parahippocampal gyrus,bilateral hippocampus,left amygdala and left fusiform compared with normal healthy elderly population;(3) Compared with the population of patients with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease population in the gray matter volume of these brain regions significant exception:the right insula, left hippocampus, the right fusiform gyrus and bilateral middle temporal gyrus. At the same time, we also found that both the population of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment patients with populations of brain gray matter volume emerged as a down-trend, but some individual gray matter volume expansion abnormally.