A literature review of MRI techniques used to detect amyloid-beta plaques in Alzheimer’s disease patients

Abstract

In this review, we aim to provide an overview of the imaging techniques most commonly used to study Alzheimer's disease (AD).Background: Neuroimaging biomarkers can be used to evaluate these abnormalities, improve the ability of early diagnosis and help predict disease progression. These signs mainly include local brain atrophy on structural MRI, hypometabolic foci, and amyloid plaque deposition in the brain detected by specific imaging.These techniques not only have their unique advantages, but can complement each other in multimodal imaging evaluation of patients with cognitive impairment and dementia.Methods: A literature search was performed on PubMed using the search term combinations "Alzheimer's disease", "Amyloid-beta plaques", and "MRI". We discuss various magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) based techniques, including direct imaging, indirect imaging, amyloid-beta (Aβ) plaque and radiomics, Hybrid PET/MRI and MRI imaging technology in the future, placing a special emphasis on multimodal imaging, and focus our review on the MRI features of Aβ plaques (AD biomarkers).Conclusions: After a lot of research and reasonable selection, multimodal imaging composed of MRI and PET can significantly improve the diagnosis and treatment of AD patients, and the complementary information can be obtained by the new PET/MR instrument at the same time. The findings of this review emphasize that multimodal imaging is likely to be the preferred method for future AD research and clinical practice.

Current Trends and Applications of PET/MRI Hybrid Imaging in Neurodegenerative Diseases and Normal Aging

“…Overall, the number of reviews after filtering was 19.4% (18/93) of the eligible articles. Common themes across these review articles included the rise of artificial intelligence, technical improvements to PET/MRI imaging, and new and previous regions of interest for evaluating dementia [ 8 , 10 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 ]. The distribution of these article types remains consistent with this current review and is discussed further in the sections below along with additional insights from the clinical articles sourced in the past five years.…”

“…Previous review literature on hybrid PET/MR imaging in dementia was mostly limited to time periods before 2020 and has focused on various specifics such as changes in image acquisition settings, post-processing, regions of interest such as the hippocampus, and tracers [ 8 , 9 , 10 ]. As imaging continues to quickly improve, the purpose of this narrative review is to examine the latest articles published between 2018 and 2023 on the applications of PET/MRI in the characterization of various subtypes of dementia.…”

Neuroimaging modalities in the detection of Alzheimer's disease-associated biomarkers

“…In addition, Traditional DTI has limitations in resolving intravoxel complexities such as crossing, fibre bending, and twisting. (ii) Methods to further improve the effect of high field intensity MRI on the human body should be further studied (Yu et al ., 2021a ). Compared with MRI, PET, and SPECT can visualize neurotransmitters and brain receptors and determine specific biomolecule concentrations in the picomolar range if developed to have higher sensitivity (Bois et al ., 2008 ; Cheng et al ., 2012 ).…”

Improving the reliability of T2measurement in magnetic resonance imaging

“…T 2 is not only sensitive to acute pathogenesis as in the strokes, but also indicative for chronic pathological development, e.g., in the Alzheimer’s disease ( 15 ). Systematic development of amyloid plaque and neurofibrillary tangles can change the microenvironment around neuronal cells and become observable via the T 2 monitoring ( 16, 17 ).…”