Since 2010, our group has developed and refined a method, Regressor Interpolation at Progressive Time Delays (RIPTiDe) to extract hemodynamic parameters (blood arrival time delay and relative blood volume) from resting state fMRI data (rs-fMRI) [Tong 2010, Erdogan 2016, Aslan 2019, 2020]. By using the RIPTiDe algorithm, we infer the relative blood arrival time and volume from the strength and delay of the peak of the crosscorrelation between each voxels’ timecourse and a “probe” timecourse representing the moving blood. RIPTiDe iteratively extracts the travelling systemic low frequency global mean signal, which exists in some form in every voxel from fMRI data, and uses the crosscorrelation function to track its progress through the brain. In our former works, we showed that an important component of the rs-fMRI data contains brain hemodynamic and cardiac related signals.
In this study, we used the publicly available Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS-3) dataset [LaMontagne 2019], which contains rs-fMRI as well as Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL) data in subjects with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), and matched healthy subjects. Recent studies show that vascular alterations are present in more than 50% of clinically diagnosed AD cases [Cortes-Canteli 2020], Detecting incipient vascular pathology could allow early intervention, mitigating the damage caused by these changes. In this study we hypothesized that RIPTiDe derived blood correlation strength maps would offer a promising tool to retrospectively extract hemodynamic information which can be used to study this newly emerging focus in Alzheimer’s studies.
We hypothesize that vascular deformation in Alzheimer people can be detected by measuring and comparing topological invariants by use of persistent homology.
We examined the maps derived from rs-fMRI to find potential differences between the 2 groups. We compared rs-fMRI data from 372 images from Alzheimer subjects and 2161 images from Control subjects in the OASIS-3 dataset. We applied persistent homology calculations to these images and for downstream analysis we calculated silhouette graphs using giotta software. The resulting 1000-dimensional vectors averaged over the Alzheimer and Control Groups separately. We calculate the difference of the silhouette graphs as a comparison we also subsample the control subjects for 372 subjects averaged the plot and take the difference as well. We observed that there is difference in the average of the silhouette graphs which indicates difference in topological invariant of Alzheimer and control subjects.