Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, and an accurate diagnosis confers many clinicalresearch and patient care benefits. The current research-setting criteria needs to consider at least one supportivebiomarker before diagnosing a subject with AD, and brain atrophy measured using structural magnetic resonance is oneof them. Yet, brain atrophy is currently defined using only volumetric information which could obviate localizedmorphological variations. We measured hippocampal neuroanatomical asymmetry from MR images of 417 subjects as asurrogate measurement of brain atrophy, anticipating that it would have a better sensitivity than volumetric informationregarding differences between healthy controls and subjects with AD. Asymmetry was defined in terms of theoverlapping voxels between left and right hippocampi after a co-registration process. We found a significant difference(p-value = 0.007) in discrimination power between hippocampal volume and neuroanatomical asymmetry. This resultsuggests that neuroanatomical asymmetry should be further studied to determine whether it could replace the currentbrain atrophy biomarker.
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