Linking white matter integrity loss to associated cortical regions using structural connectivity information in Alzheimer's disease and fronto-temporal dementia: The Loss in Connectivity (LoCo) score

It is well known that gray matter changes occur in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's (AD) and fronto-temporal dementia (FTD), and several studies have investigated their respective patterns of atrophy progression. Recent work, however, has revealed that diffusion MRI that is able to detect white matter integrity changes may be an earlier or more sensitive biomarker in both diseases. However, studies that examine white matter changes only are limited in that they do not provide the functional specificity of GM region-based analysis. In this study, we develop a new metric called the Loss in Connectivity (LoCo) score that gives the amount of structural network disruption incurred by a gray matter region for a particular pattern of white matter integrity loss. Leveraging the relative strengths of WM and GM markers, this metric links areas of WM integrity loss to their connected GM regions as a first step in understanding their functional implications. The LoCo score is calculated for three groups: 18AD, 18 FTD, and 19 age-matched normal controls. We show significant correlations of the LoCo with the respective atrophy patterns in AD (R=0.51, p=2.2 x 10(-9)) and FTD (R=0.49, p=2.5 x 10(-8)) for a standard 116 region gray matter atlas. In addition, we demonstrate that the LoCo outperforms a measure of gray matter atrophy when classifying individuals into AD, FTD, and normal groups. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.