Regional specificity of MRI contrast parameter changes in normal ageing revealed by voxel-based quantification (VBQ)

By Bogdan Draganski, John Ashburner, Chloe Hutton, Ferath Kherif, Richard S. J. Frackowiak, G. Helms, Nikolaus Weiskopf. NeuroImage, 2011

302 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Normal ageing is associated with characteristic changes in brain microstructure. Although in vivo neuroimaging captures spatial and temporal patterns of age-related changes of anatomy at the macroscopic scale, our knowledge of the underlying (patho)physiological processes at cellular and molecular levels is still limited. The aim of this study is to explore brain tissue properties in normal ageing using quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) alongside conventional morphological assessment. Using a whole-brain approach in a cohort of 26 adults, aged 18–85 years, we performed voxel-based morphometric (VBM) analysis and voxel-based quantification (VBQ) of diffusion tensor, magnetization transfer (MT), R1, and R2* relaxation parameters. We found age-related reductions in cortical and subcortical grey matter volume paralleled by changes in fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), MT and R2*. The latter were regionally specific depending on their differential sensitivity to microscopic tissue properties. VBQ of white matter revealed distinct anatomical patterns of age-related change in microstructure. Widespread and profound reduction in MT contrasted with local FA decreases paralleled by MD increases. R1 reductions and R2* increases were observed to a smaller extent in overlapping occipito-parietal white matter regions. We interpret our findings, based on current biophysical models, as a fingerprint of age-dependent brain atrophy and underlying microstructural changes in myelin, iron deposits and water. The VBQ approach we present allows for systematic unbiased exploration of the interaction between imaging parameters and extends current methods for detection of neurodegenerative processes in the brain. The demonstrated parameter-specific distribution patterns offer insights into age-related brain structure changes in vivo and provide essential baseline data for studying disease against a background of healthy ageing.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96c680be1f0af17a728261532b54686050b0a0c6

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Citations in the corpus

The electric field in the cortex during transcranial current stimulation (2013, background): “…be improved by incorporating additional information during the segmentation process or when assigning physical properties, either from diffusion tensor MR data (Gullmar et al., 2010; Hallez et al., 2009; Wolters et al., 2006) or from voxel based quantification (VBQ) (Draganski et al., 2011).”
A review of atlas-based segmentation for magnetic resonance brain images (2011, background): “[128] B.”
Using high-resolution quantitative mapping of R1 as an index of cortical myelination (2014, unknown): “MPM acquisitions offer interesting prospects for the multivariate study of the brain's morphology (Helms et al., 2009; Lambert et al., 2012) and micro-architecture (Draganski et al., 2011).”
Characterization of Cerebral White Matter Properties Using Quantitative MRI Stains (2011, background): “An aging study of several qMRI measures (DTI FA and MD, MTR, and T1, T2, T2* relaxation times) in healthy adults versus age (range 18–85 years) revealed distinct age-related trajectories and spatial patterns for each of the qMRI measures (Draganski et al., 2011).”
Quantitative multi-parameter mapping of R1, PD*, MT, and R2* at 3T: a multi-center validation (2013, methodology): “MPM was used to study a wide range of different tissue changes in e.g., healthy aging (Draganski et al., 2011) or prosopagnosia (Garrido et al., 2009).”