Functional connectivity of default mode network in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

• Grant number: 14/00144-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate (Direct)
• Effective date (Start): April 01, 2014
• Effective date (End): September 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine
• Principal Investigator: Marcio Luiz Figueredo Balthazar
• Grantee: Marina Weiler
• Supervisor: Massimo Filippi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências Médicas (FCM). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico S. de Bellis (IRCCS), Italy
• Associated to the scholarship: 13/10431-9 - Anatomical and functional connectivity in Default Mode and Salience Networks in mild dementia of Alzheimer's Disease and amnestic mild cognitive impairment, BP.DD

Abstract

Recent research in the Alzheimer's disease (AD) neuroimaging field has moved beyond regional alterations, raising the concept of dysfunctionality of brain networks to explain the cognitive and clinical symptoms of AD patients. Amongst all networks investigated in the AD field, the Default Mode Network (DMN) is undoubtedly the most studied, and several studies show a breakdown in its functional connectivity even during mild stages of the disease. Nevertheless, Alzheimer's is a disease associated with not only functional but also structural brain alterations. As atrophy and functional deficit patterns may overlap, there has been growing interest in recent years in studying the relationship between the two processes. Although additional imaging modalities have emerged lately, images produced by different approaches are often analyzed separately, and there is a relative lack of available multimodal image analysis methodologies. To overcome those limitations, above reported, a new toolbox for multimodal image analysis called biological parametric mapping (BPM) has been developed. The BPM toolbox incorporates information obtained from other modalities as regressors in a voxel-wise analysis, thereby permitting investigation of more sophisticated hypotheses which modality-specific analysis do not. Therefore, the main objective of this project is to combine different neuroimaging methods and assess the contribution of anatomical effects to functional connectivity data through the BPM software. (AU)