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Conductance-Based Structural Brain Connectivity in Aging and Dementia

Background Structural brain connectivity has been shown to be sensitive to the changes that the brain undergoes during Alzheimer’s disease (AD) progression. Methods In this work, we use our recently proposed structural connectivity quantification measure derived from diffusion MRI, which accounts for both direct and indirect pathways, to quantify brain connectivity in dementia. We analyze data from the ADNI-2 and OASIS-3 datasets to derive relevant information for the study of the changes that the brain undergoes in AD. We also compare these datasets to the HCP dataset, as a reference. Results Our analysis shows expected trends of mean conductance with respect to age and cognitive scores, significant age prediction values in aging data, and regional effects centered among subcortical regions, and cingulate and temporal cortices. Discussion Results indicate that the conductance measure has prediction potential, especially for age, that age and cognitive scores largely overlap, and that this measure could be used to study effects such as anti-correlation in structural connections. Impact statement This work presents a methodology and a set of analyses that open new possibilities in the study of healthy and pathological aging. The methodology used here is sensitive to direct and indirect pathways in deriving brain connectivity measures from dMRI, and therefore provides information that many state-of-the-art methods do not account for. As a result, this technique may provide the research community with ways to detect subtle effects of healthy aging and AD.