Identifying functional imaging markers of mild cognitive impairment in early Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease using multivariate analysis

Functional neuroimaging, such as positron emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), provides a valuable technique for detecting regional changes in brain metabolic activity and blood flow associated with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia. Multivariate analysis techniques have recently received increasing attention. The results of multivariate analysis can be more easily interpreted as a signature of neuronal networks, which lend themselves to prospective application of results from the analysis of one dataset to entirely new datasets. They are well placed to provide information about mean differences and correlations with behavior with potentially greater statistical power and better reproducibility. This article will focus on investigating the baseline and progression of MCI using functional brain imaging techniques and multivariate analysis in order to understand the genesis and natural history of cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), respectively.