Regional homogeneity, functional connectivity and imaging markers of Alzheimer's disease: A review of resting-state fMRI studies

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a promising technique for measuring brain activities during rest, has attracted much attention in the past few years. In this paper, we review recent progress on the study of Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on resting-state fMRI. First, we briefly introduce some AD-related studies from other groups. Then we describe our AD-related work in detail from three aspects: (1) alterations in regional homogeneity (ReHo) of the fMRI signal in the resting state, (2) altered patterns of functional connectivity from regions of interest and whole brain analyses, and (3) discriminative analyses based on classification features from resting-state fMRI data for differentiating AD patients from healthy elders. Finally, we summarize the main results and some prospects for future work. (c) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd.