Ventricular features as reliable differentiators between bvFTD and other dementias

Introduction: Lateral ventricles are reliable and sensitive indicators of brain atrophy and disease progression in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We aimed to investigate whether an automated tool using ventricular features could improve diagnostic accuracy in bvFTD across neurodegenerative diseases. Methods: Using 678 subjects 69 bvFTD, 38 semantic variant, 37 primary non-fluent aphasia, 218 amyloid + mild cognitive impairment, 74 amyloid + Alzheimer's Dementia and 242 normal controls- with a total of 2750 timepoints, lateral ventricles were segmented and differences in ventricular features were assessed between bvFTD, normal controls and other dementia cohorts. Results: Ventricular antero-posterior ratio (APR) was the only feature that was significantly different and increased faster in bvFTD compared to all other cohorts. We achieved a 10-fold cross-validation accuracy of 80% (77% sensitivity, 82% specificity) in differentiating bvFTD from all other cohorts with other ventricular features (i.e., total ventricular volume and left-right lateral ventricle ratios), and 76% accuracy using only the single APR feature. Discussion: Ventricular features, particularly the APR, might be reliable and easy-to-implement markers for bvFTD diagnosis. We have made our ventricle feature estimation and bvFTD diagnostic tool publicly available, allowing application of our model in other studies.

Automated summary

This study used an automated tool to analyze lateral ventricles and found that ventricular features, particularly the antero-posterior ratio (APR), may be reliable and easy-to-implement markers for the diagnosis of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Differentiating bvFTD from other dementia cohorts achieved a high accuracy using either other ventricular features or just the APR feature alone.