Early Detection of Amyloid Plaque in Alzheimer's Disease via X-ray Phase CT
Abstract
In this project, we proposed to develop the x-ray phase contrast CT (PCCT) imaging method for early detection of amyloid plaque in Alzheimers disease, with three Specific Aims: 1 Develop and optimize an x-ray PCCT to explore the methodology of direct imaging of AP; 2 Evaluate the PCCTs capability of imaging A(beta) 1-40/A(beta) 1-42 peptides/fibrils at the concentrations existing in AD brain; 3 Verify the PCCTscapability of direct imaging of AP in AD using postmortem brain specimens. Even though the fabrication of x-ray gratings were much morecomplicated and challenging than initially anticipated, the prototype x-ray PCCT has been built successfully and works in full functionality.We imaged the specimens of AD brain, normally aged brain and pathologically aged brain, with three major findings: (i) the contrast betweengrey matter and white matter in x-ray PCCT image is substantially higher than that in conventional CT image, (ii) given identical x-ray dose,the PCCT image of brain specimen is of substantially higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than that of conventional CT image, and (iii) evenwith substantially improved SNR, the PCCT still cannot convincingly differentiate the AD brain specimen with amyloid plaques from thenormal aged brain specimen without amyloid plaques, probably due to the fact that, limited by the output power of micro-focus x-ray tube, the acquisition of one set of projection by the prototype system takes about 12 hours, which may degrade the prototype systems imaging performance significantly (thus opportunity for future research). Under partial support of this grant, five journal papers have been published in Medical Physics, and more than eight papers in leading international conferences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 2016
- Accession Number
- AD1014068
Entities
People
- Xiangyang Tang
Organizations
- Emory University