Sequential disconnection of the brain in Alzheimer’s disease

My latest paper on Alzheimer’s disease progression is available in Frontiers in Neurology:

Data Driven Sequence of Changes to Anatomical Brain Connectivity in Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease Neil Oxtoby, Sara Garbarino, Nick Firth, Jason Warren, Jon Schott, Danny Alexander Front. Neurol., 8, 580 (2017)

Alzheimer’s disease is thought to be a “disconnection syndrome”, where brain regions becomes increasingly disconnected due to neurodegeneration. No-one has examined the sequence of changes in the elderly brain’s anatomical connectivity over the course of a neurodegenerative disease.

Until now.

In this paper, I analysed brain imaging data (MRI) to build connectomes for healthy and diseased individuals from the public ADNI dataset, and summarised brain connectivity in health and disease using graph theory metrics.

These metrics were then plugged into our ever-reliable event-based model of disease progression (with an important tweak courtesy of Nick) in order to find the sequence of brain disconnections due to Alzheimer’s disease. The paper was published on 7 Nov 2017.