A Novel Network Diffusion Model for Alzheimer's And Other Neurodegenerative Disea

描述（由申请人提供）：阿尔茨海默病（AD）和其他痴呆症影响全球约2500万人，对老年患者的身心健康造成巨大影响。AD治疗缺乏进展的一个主要原因是对其病因和进展机制缺乏基本了解。尽管使用复杂的神经解剖算法在检测和量化AD疾病进展方面取得了令人印象深刻的进展，但很少有系统级模型可以解释观察到的AD神经退行性变模式。我们现在提出一个新的模型，萎缩作为一个扩散过程中的一个假设的大脑网络。该模型在数学上编码了以下基本理解：传播遵循纤维路径，以与局部萎缩梯度成比例的向外速率从更多萎缩区域到更少萎缩区域，其方式类似于具有温度梯度的网络中的热传递。令人惊讶的是，该模型暗示了AD和其他退行性疾病中的萎缩模式。最后，我们建议使用我们的模型来预测未来的萎缩模式，任何患者使用他们的基线神经影像学数据。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and other dementias affect approximately 25 million people worldwide, taking a huge toll on the physical and psychological well being of elderly patients. A major reason for lack of progress in AD treatment is a fundamental lack of understanding regarding its cause and mechanism of progression. Despite impressive progress in detecting and quantifying disease progression in AD using sophisticated neuroanatomic algorithms, there are very few system-level models which can explain the observed patterns of neurodegeneration in AD. We now propose a novel model of atrophy as a diffusion process on a hypothesized brain network. The model mathematically encodes the basic understanding that propagation follows fiber pathways, going from more to less atrophied regions at an outward rate proportional to the local atrophy gradient, in a manner akin to heat transfer in a network with temperature gradients. Surprisingly, the model implies atrophy patterns in AD and other degenerative diseases. Finally, we propose to use our model to predict the future atrophic patterns for any patient using their baseline neuroimaging data.