Multiparametric Imaging in Neurodegenerative Disease

Neuroimaging techniques that can help elucidate and characterize the nature and mechanism of tissue injury and disease progression in neurodegenerative disease are of particular importance given its their roles in seeking successful preventive and therapeutic treatments. Studying large-scale samples with various disease mechanisms using multi-parametric imaging, as well as revealing the correlations between the neuroimaging metrics and clinical data including neurocognitive function and neuropsychological inventories to elucidate multiple factors affecting the neurodegeneration processes in brain are the main topics of this book. In addition, the neural underpins of cognitive and psychological functions with advanced functional imaging techniques can provide better cross-validation and clinical symptom relevance of multi-parametric data. Expanding the current findings with higher diagnosis accuracy and detection specificity in multiple neurodegenerative diseases as well as better differentiation of each type are the ultimate goal. The results in this book will extend the current notion of diagnosis value of various relatively new imaging techniques in multiple neurodegenerative diseases including traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple sclerosis and early stage of Alzheimer's disease such as mild cognitive impairment. Specifically, the neurobiology and related imaging findings of the four representative neurodegenerative diseases will be introduced and reviewed, including brain region-specific and disease-related alterations, unique clinical symptom of each disease, as well as previous findings and challenges. There is an increasing body of literature suggesting that damage to the default mode network, hypothalamus, thalamus and hippocampus neuronal networks and local injuries might be under-diagnosed and may account for some of the sequelae following the neurodegenerative injuries including trauma and dementia. The relatively novel imaging results to differentiate each disease using advanced functional connectivity, neuronal activity, microstructure integrity analysis based on structural connectivity, multi-dimensional morphometry and molecular imaging tracers including amyloid and tau for neuropathological burden quantification were presented to differentiate each type of disease. We then briefly reviewed some of the therapeutic effects of traditional Chinese medicine with neuroimaging quantifications to help treating neurodegenerative diseases. Finally, our work proves that the multi-parametric neuroimaging methods with more than twelve metrics and numerous tight clinical association data presented in this book are the most forefront and up-to-date with enough sensitivity, precision and resolution. Taken together, multiple neuroimaging metrics haved been demonstrated in this book to identify and quantify significant and distinct brain alterations at function, microstructure, morphology and molecular scales in different types of neurodegenerative diseases with high sensitivity and specificity. These comprehensive imaging features could be combined to improve disease diagnosis accuracy. The aim of this book is thus intended to provide both beginners and experts in biomedical imaging and health care a broad and complete picture as well as the new developments of using multiple metrics in improving disease identification and diagnosis accuracy. This book would hopefully capture the interests of colleagues interested in neurodegenerative disease diagnosis and treatment, and could help convey the methodological and integrative perspectives of multi-parametric neuroimaging applications.