MRI May Assist Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease
A new study described by America’s Health Insurance Plans indicates that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may enable clinicians to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease with more precision than is currently available.
The current means to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease requires intensive review of brain imaging to detect the degree of atrophy, particularly in the hippocampus. This approach is incredibly time consuming, in addition to technically challenging. As such, this type of examination is rarely completed.
The research team from Paris utilized an automated system incorporated into a computer software system to assess the hippocampus in a group of 74 patients who all underwent MRI studies. Within that group, 25 were either healthy or had Alzheimer’s disease and the remaining 24 had mild cognitive impairment.
The research team completed manual assessment of MRIs, as well as incorporating the automated computer system. The automated approach was completed in a few minutes, compared to an hour to complete the manual review.
The team noted that both the patients with cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s had a decreased hippocampus compared to the healthy patients. This loss of volume was more significant among the patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
The team concluded that this automated computer system can help clinicians more accurately identify those patients with Alzheimer’s disease, in cooperation with other testing methods.
July 16, 2008 Related topics: Diagnostic, Psychiatry & Neurology