Abstract

This paper proposes a framework to simulate patient specific structural Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) from the available time-points of Alzheimer’s Disease(AD) subjects. We use a biophysical model of brain deformation due to atrophy that can generate biologically plausible deformation for any given desired volume changes at the voxel level of the brain MRI. Large number of brain regions are segmented in 45 AD patients and the atrophy rates per year are estimated in these regions from two extremal available scans. Assuming linear progression of atrophy, the volume changes in scans closest to the middle time-point images from the baseline scans are computed. These atrophy maps are prescribed to the baseline images to simulate the middle time-point images by using the biophysical model of brain deformation. The volume changes from the baseline image to the real middle time-point are compared to the volume changes in the simulated middle time-point images. This present framework also allows to introduce desired atrophy patterns at different time-points to simulate non-linear progression of atrophy. This opens a way to use a biophysical model of brain deformation to evaluate methods that study the temporal progression and spatial relationships of atrophy evolution in AD.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, biophysical modeling, biomechanical simulation

This is a pre-print of the following published article: Bishesh Khanal, Marco Lorenzi, Nicholas Ayache, Xavier Pennec. Simulating Patient Specific Multiple Time-point MRIs From a Biophysical Model of Brain Deformation in Alzheimer’s Disease. Workshop on Computational Biomechanics for Medicine - X, Oct 2015, Munich, France. 2015.