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Dong Q, Zhang W, Wu J, Li B, Schron EH, McMahon T, Shi J, Gutman BA, Chen K, Baxter LC, Thompson PM, Reiman EM, Caselli RJ, Wang Y. Applying surface-based hippocampal morphometry to study APOE-E4 allele dose effects in cognitively unimpaired subjects. Neuroimage Clin 2019; 22:101744. [PMID: 30852398 PMCID: PMC6411498 DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2019.101744] [Citation(s) in RCA: 30] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/07/2018] [Revised: 02/02/2019] [Accepted: 03/02/2019] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Apolipoprotein E (APOE) e4 is the major genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). The dose-dependent impact of this allele on hippocampal volumes has been documented, but its influence on general hippocampal morphology in cognitively unimpaired individuals is still elusive. Capitalizing on the study of a large number of cognitively unimpaired late middle aged and older adults with two, one and no APOE-e4 alleles, the current study aims to characterize the ability of our automated surface-based hippocampal morphometry algorithm to distinguish between these three levels of genetic risk for AD and demonstrate its superiority to a commonly used hippocampal volume measurement. We examined the APOE-e4 dose effect on cross-sectional hippocampal morphology analysis in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) database of 117 cognitively unimpaired subjects aged between 50 and 85 years (mean = 57.4, SD = 6.3), including 36 heterozygotes (e3/e4), 37 homozygotes (e4/e4) and 44 non-carriers (e3/e3). The proposed automated framework includes hippocampal surface segmentation and reconstruction, higher-order hippocampal surface correspondence computation, and hippocampal surface deformation analysis with multivariate statistics. In our experiments, the surface-based method identified APOE-e4 dose effects on the left hippocampal morphology. Compared to the widely-used hippocampal volume measure, our hippocampal morphometry statistics showed greater statistical power by distinguishing cognitively unimpaired subjects with two, one, and no APOE-e4 alleles. Our findings mirrored previous studies showing that APOE-e4 has a dose effect on the acceleration of brain structure deformities. The results indicated that the proposed surface-based hippocampal morphometry measure is a potential preclinical AD imaging biomarker for cognitively unimpaired individuals. Applied surface-based hippocampal morphometry on cognitively unimpaired subjects. Our study identified APOE-e4 dose effects on cognitively unimpaired subjects. Surface-based hippocampal morphometry outperformed the hippocampal volume measure. Surface-based hippocampal morphometry may be a potential preclinical AD biomarker.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qunxi Dong
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | - Wen Zhang
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | - Jianfeng Wu
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | - Bolun Li
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | | | - Travis McMahon
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | - Jie Shi
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA
| | - Boris A Gutman
- Armour College of Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA
| | - Kewei Chen
- Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA
| | - Leslie C Baxter
- Human Brain Imaging Laboratory, Barrow Neurological Institute, Phoenix, AZ, USA
| | - Paul M Thompson
- Imaging Genetics Center, Institute for Neuroimaging and Informatics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
| | | | | | - Yalin Wang
- School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
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