Brain white matter shape changes in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): a fractal dimension study.

Autor: Venkateswaran Rajagopalan, Zao Liu, Didier Allexandre, Luduan Zhang, Xiao-Feng Wang, Erik P Pioro, Guang H Yue
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2013
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 8, Iss 9, p e73614 (2013)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0073614
Popis: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Current diagnosis time is about 12-months due to lack of objective methods. Previous brain white matter voxel based morphometry (VBM) studies in ALS reported inconsistent results. Fractal dimension (FD) has successfully been used to quantify brain WM shape complexity in various neurological disorders and aging, but not yet studied in ALS. Therefore, we investigated WM morphometric changes using FD analyses in ALS patients with different clinical phenotypes. We hypothesized that FD would better capture clinical features of the WM morphometry in different ALS phenotypes than VBM analysis. High resolution MRI T1-weighted images were acquired in controls (n = 11), and ALS patients (n = 89). ALS patients were assigned into four subgroups based on their clinical phenotypes.VBM analysis was carried out using SPM8. FD values were estimated for brain WM skeleton, surface and general structure in both controls and ALS patients using our previously published algorithm. No significant VBM WM changes were observed between controls and ALS patients and among the ALS subgroups. In contrast, significant (p
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