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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- More than five million people in the United States have Alzheimers disease, but a new automated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method may help diagnose the disease earlier.
Using a process called segmentation, MRI allows radiologists to see where nerve cell death and tissue loss has caused the brains of Alzheimers patients to shrink. The standard segmentation method is complicated and lengthy, but a new automated process takes only a few minutes rather than an hour and is just as accurate.
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Researchers measured the hippocampus volume of 25 patients with Alzheimers disease, 24 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 25 healthy adults. They found the new MRI procedure to be as accurate as the standard segmentation process. Alzheimers patients had lost an average of 32 percent of their hippocampus volume while those with mild cognitive impairment lost an average of 19 percent. These results were similar to results from manual segmentation.
Visually evaluating the atrophy of the hippocampus is not only difficult and prone to subjectivity, it is time-consuming, Olivier Colliot, Ph.D., lead author and researcher at the Cognitive Neuroscience and Brain Imaging Laboratory in Paris was quoted as saying. As a result, it hasnt become part of clinical routine. He adds, Combined with other clinical and neurospychological evaluations, automated segmentation of the hippocampus on MR images can contribute to a more accurate diagnosis of Alzheimers disease.
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SOURCE: Radiology, 2008;248:194-201
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
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