Resting State Functional FDG-PET Analysis And Clinical Applications

Brain function is organized by two major organizational principles of functional segregation and functional integration. With the involvement of a rapid developmental computer vision and non-invasive medical imaging technology, we can form a systematic study on the brain function. In this paper, we analyze fluorodeoxyglucose-Positron-emission tomography to present the effect of cognitive disorder on brain. The main contents and contributions of the dissertation are as follows:(?) Differences between healthy people and patients with AD:a resting PET studyWe used FDG-PET approach to explore the effect of disorder on brain functional behaviors and found that patients with AD had remarkable lower uptakes than normal controls. Meantime, we found the overlay regions by comparing AD and MCI with lower severity. That indicated a decreasing trend from normal controls to AD which is consisted with many studies. Mild cognitive impairment is a middle severity between normal controls and AD. Furthermore, our findings support default mode hypothesis of some existent cognitive activation of brain mechanism without stimuli from outside.(?) Can PET predict the rapid convert of MCI to ADIt is well known that MCI is a kind of impairment with lower uptakes in brain than NC. And from previous studies, we know that many MCIs may convert to AD at last. The present study found a typical lower uptake in prefrontal cortex comparing the converted aMCI and non-converted sMCI as well as right temporal cortex. We suggest a inherent decreasing pattern between them. That would be meaningful by predicting the severity of disease progression and giving the evidence to implement drug intervention on clinical pathology to slow this progression.(?) Effect of BDNF val66met polymorphism on brain metabolismIn our work, we investigate the effect of brain-derived neurotrophic factor val66met polymorphism on human brain functional metabolism. Then we found some important differences in some regions comparing met carriers and non-carriers by splitting all participants. Those regions included prefrontal, parietal, parahippocampus guys, temporal cortex and insula in which parahippocampus gyrus and post-parietal frontal cortex also play role regions in AD studies. All the findings provide evidence for the effect of BDNF on brain FDG uptakes and new perspective for gene study.