Uncovering Heterogeneity in Alzheimer's Disease from Graphical Modeling of the Tau Spatiotemporal Topography.

Abstract

Growing evidence from post-mortem and in vivo studies have demonstrated the substantial variability of tau pathology spreading patterns in Alzheimer's disease(AD). Automated tools for characterizing the heterogeneity of tau pathology will enable a more accurate understanding of the disease and help the development of targeted treatment. In this paper, we propose a Reeb graph representation of tau pathology topography on cortical surfaces using tau PET imaging data. By comparing the spatial and temporal coherence of the Reeb graph representation across subjects, we can build a directed graph to represent the distribution of tau topography over a population, which naturally facilitates the discovery of spatiotemporal subtypes of tau pathology with graph-based clustering. In our experiments, we conducted extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art event-based model on synthetic and large-scale tau PET imaging data from ADNI3 and A4 studies. We demonstrated that our proposed method can more robustly achieve the subtyping of tau pathology with clear clinical significance and demonstrated superior generalization performance than event-based model.