Structural and functional brain imaging in the assessment of prodromal Alzheimer's disease

Multiple biomarkers have proved sensitive to AD and MCI, a potential prodromal stage of AD. These include patterns of regional cerebral atrophy and hypometabolism detected by MR imaging and FDG-PET1 and quantification of specific proteins in the CSF. There is active research aimed at identifying automated methodologies able to extract accurate classification indexes. Such indexes should be fit for identifying AD patients as early as possible. The noticeable growth in the number of candidate biomarkers poses the question on which one can add more value to the routinely performed episodic memory tests. A key contribution to biomarker findings came from the recent availability of large multi-centers studies supported by the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the European Alzheimer's Disease Consortium (EADC). In our work we shall briefly review the status of MRI and PET biomarkers findings and we will detail the recent advances in automatic image analysis ongoing in the MAGIC-5 project.