Estimation of Amyloid-β Positivity Using QSM Images Considering Age Information

Tsubasa Kunieda, Ren Togo, Noriko Nishioka, Yukie Shimizu, Shiro Watanabe, Kenji Hirata, Keisuke Maeda, Takahiro Ogawa, Kohsuke Kudo, Miki Haseyama

Abstract: We propose a method to estimate amyloid-β positivity from axial slices of Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) considering patient age. Although QSM has received much attention for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, the slices reflect not only iron deposition derived from Alzheimer’s disease but also physiological iron deposition due to age. Our method uses both QSM images and patient age to train the model, and thus alleviates the negative effects by referring to iron deposition in patients of similar age. Experimental results show the effectiveness of using both QSM slices and patient age.