Texture Analysis and Volumetry of Hippocampus and Medial Temporal Lobe in Patients with Alzheimer´s Disease

This study investigated the texture features and volumes of bilateral hippocampus and medial temporal lobe (MTL) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in patients with Alzheimer´s disease (AD). Texture features were extracted using gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) in 29 elderly AD patients, 19 age-matched non-demented controls (EC) and 18 young healthy controls (YC). The correlation between texture features and corresponding volumes was analyzed. Significant differences were found in both HF and MTL between AD and EC group in both volumes (p<;0.001) and texture features (p<;0.01). In addition, the texture features were markedly correlated with the corresponding volumes of both sites (p<;0.01 for HF, and p<;0.05 for MTL). While no significant differences were detected between EC and YC group on both texture features and volumes of HF, which indicated that ageing-associated regional changes such as atrophy were distinct from the AD-associated changes. The results suggest that texture features may be valuable to detect the underlying pathological changes in AD and like volumetry, texture analysis may serve as an aid for AD diagnosis.