MRI morphometry in Alzheimer's disease

MRI based evaluation of brain atrophy is regarded as a valid method to stage the disease and to assess progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Volumetric software programs have made it possible to quantify gray matter in the human brain in an automated fashion. At present, voxel based morphometry (VBM) is easily applicable to the routine clinical procedure with a short execution time. The importance of the VBM approach is that it is not biased to one particular structure and is able to assess anatomical differences throughout the brain. Stand-alone VBM software running on Windows, Voxel-based Specific Regional analysis system for AD (VSRAD), has been widely used in the clinical diagnosis of AD in Japan. On the other hand, recent application of graph theory to MRI has made it possible to analyze changes in structural connectivity in AD.