Advances on Alzheimer's disease with neuroimaging

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease characterized by impaired memory and other cognitive functions. Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated regional structural and functional changes. Recent progressions on multi-modal imaging techniques and human brain connectome methods have allowed us to explore alterations of structural and functional networks in AD. Using these approaches, many studies have discovered AD-related network disruption, including connectivity strength, network efficiency, modular structure and network hubs. These findings provide novel insights into the understanding of AD notion of network disintegration and might lead to uncover disease biomarker for early diagnosis in AD. Most importantly, these findings in AD have been also demonstrated in the individuals at risk for AD (e.g., mild cognitive impairment), suggesting that the neuroimaging studies of AD should be moved into the prodromal stage of AD from the dementia stage.