The Correlation of Cognitive Decline with Frontotemporal Dementia Induced Annualized Gray Matter Loss Using Diffeomorphic Morphometry

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Abstract
This study uses large deformation medical image registration to analyze, in a disease-specific normalized space, the annual rate of gray matter atrophy caused by frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and its correlation with cognitive decline. The analysis consists of three parts. First, a labeled structural MRI atlas is deformed into the shape of an average FTD brain. Second, annualized FTD-related atrophy of gray matter structures is estimated for each patient in the database. Third, the group-wise annualized atrophy rate caused by FTD is correlated, for each gray matter voxel, with declining performance on cognitive tests. This study gives insight into the relationship between FTD-related progressive cortical atrophy and loss in cognitive function.