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Current Alzheimer Research

Editor-in-Chief

ISSN (Print): 1567-2050
ISSN (Online): 1875-5828

Research Article

The Parietal Atrophy Score on Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a Reliable Visual Scale

Author(s): David Silhan, Ales Bartos*, Jana Mrzilkova, Olga Pashkovska, Ibrahim Ibrahim and Jaroslav Tintera

Volume 17, Issue 6, 2020

Page: [534 - 539] Pages: 6

DOI: 10.2174/1567205017666200807193957

open access plus

Abstract

Aims: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the reliability of our new visual scale for a quick atrophy assessment of parietal lobes on brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) among different professionals. A good agreement would justify its use for differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative dementias, especially early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), in clinical settings.

Methods: The visual scale named the Parietal Atrophy Score (PAS) is based on a semi-quantitative assessment ranging from 0 (no atrophy) to 2 (prominent atrophy) in three parietal structures (sulcus cingularis posterior, precuneus, parietal gyri) on T1-weighted MRI coronal slices through the whole parietal lobes. We used kappa statistics to evaluate intra-rater and inter-rater agreement among four raters who independently scored parietal atrophy using PAS. Rater 1 was a neuroanatomist (JM), rater 2 was an expert in MRI acquisition and analysis (II), rater 3 was a medical student (OP) and rater 4 was a neurologist (DS) who evaluated parietal atrophy twice in a 3-month interval to assess intra-rater agreement. All raters evaluated the same 50 parietal lobes on brain MRI of 25 cognitively normal individuals with even distribution across all atrophy degrees from none to prominent according to the neurologist’s rating.

Results: Intra-rater agreement was almost perfect with the kappa value of 0.90. Inter-rater agreement was moderate to substantial with kappa values ranging from 0.43-0.86.

Conclusion: The Parietal Atrophy Score is the reliable visual scale among raters of different professions for a quick evaluation of parietal lobes on brain MRI within 1-2 minutes. We believe it could be used as an adjunct measure in differential diagnosis of dementias, especially early-onset AD.

Keywords: Parietal Atrophy Score, reliability, visual scale, brain magnetic resonance imaging, Alzheimer's disease, dementia.

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