Ventricle features as reliable differentiators between the bvFTD and other dementias

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that ventricular features, especially the antero-posterior ratio, can reliably differentiate bvFTD from other dementias with high accuracy, aiding diagnosis through an automated tool.

Contribution

The paper introduces an automated ventricular feature analysis method that improves diagnostic accuracy for bvFTD across neurodegenerative diseases.

Findings

Ventricular antero-posterior ratio (APR) is significantly higher in bvFTD.

Automated ventricular features achieved 80% accuracy in differentiating bvFTD.

APR alone provided 76% diagnostic accuracy.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Lateral ventricles are reliable and sensitive indicators of brain atrophy and disease progression in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We aimed to investigate whether an automated tool using ventricular features could improve diagnostic accuracy in bvFTD across neurodegenerative diseases. METHODS: Using 678 subjects (2750 timepoints), differences in ventricular features were assessed between bvFTD, normal controls and other dementia cohorts. RESULTS: Ventricular antero-posterior ratio (APR) was the only feature that was significantly different and increased faster in bvFTD compared to all other cohorts. We achieved a 10-fold cross-validation accuracy of 80% (77% sensitivity, 82% specificity) in differentiating bvFTD from all other cohorts with ventricular features, and 76% accuracy using only the single APR feature. DISCUSSION: APR could be a useful and easy-to-implement feature to aid bvFTD diagnosis. We have made our ventricle feature estimation and bvFTD diagnostic tool publicly available, allowing application of our model in other studies.