Sammanfattning
Background. The aim of the present study was to examine the practical usefulness of fully automatic quantification of brain structures by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for diagnosing dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT).
Material and method. MRI scans of the brains of 122 patients referred to a memory clinic were analysed using Neuroquant software, which quantifies the volume of various brain structures. Clinical diagnoses were made by two doctors without knowledge of the MRI results. We performed receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses and calculated the area under the curve (AUC). A value of 1 means that all diseased patients have been diagnosed as such and no patient has been falsely diagnosed as diseased.
Results. The mean age of the patients was 67.2 (SD 10.5 years), 60 % were men, 63 had DAT, 24 had another type of dementia, 25 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and ten had subjective cognitive impairment (SCI). In the comparison between DAT patients and patients with SCI or MCI, seven of eleven volumes were significantly larger than AUC 0.5. Positive and negative likelihood ratios were less than 5 and more than 0.2, respectively, for the best threshold values of the volumes. Apart from the cerebellum (AUC 0.67), none of the brain structures was significantly different from AUC 0.5 in patients with other dementia disorders compared with patients with DAT.
Interpretation. MRI scans with Neuroquant analyses cannot be used alone to distinguish between persons with DAT and persons without dementia.