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.

• Klíčová slova
• Alzheimer's disease, Parietal Atrophy Score, brain magnetic resonance imaging, dementia, reliability, visual scale,
• MeSH
• atrofie MeSH
• lidé středního věku MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• magnetická rezonanční tomografie MeSH
• mozek diagnostické zobrazování   patologie   MeSH
• neurozobrazování MeSH
• odchylka pozorovatele MeSH
• reprodukovatelnost výsledků MeSH
• senioři MeSH
• studie případů a kontrol MeSH
• stupeň závažnosti nemoci MeSH
• temenní lalok diagnostické zobrazování   patologie   MeSH
• testy pro posouzení mentálních funkcí a demence MeSH
• vizuální analogová stupnice MeSH
• Check Tag
• lidé středního věku MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• senioři MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• práce podpořená grantem MeSH

Fractional anisotropy (FA) is the most commonly used quantitative measure of diffusion in the brain. Changes in FA have been reported in many neurological disorders, but the implementation of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in daily clinical practice remains challenging. We propose a novel color look-up table (LUT) based on normative data as a tool for screening FA changes. FA was calculated for 76 healthy volunteers using 12 motion-probing gradient directions (MPG), a subset of 59 subjects was additionally scanned using 30 MPG. Population means and 95% prediction intervals for FA in the corpus callosum, frontal gray matter, thalamus and basal ganglia were used to create the LUT. Unique colors were assigned to inflection points with continuous ramps between them. Clinical use was demonstrated on 17 multiple system atrophy (MSA) patients compared to 13 patients with Parkinson disease (PD) and 17 healthy subjects. Four blinded radiologists classified subjects as MSA/non-MSA. Using only the LUT, high sensitivity (80%) and specificity (84%) were achieved in differentiating MSA subjects from PD subjects and controls. The LUTs generated from 12 and 30 MPG were comparable and accentuate FA abnormalities.

• MeSH
• algoritmy MeSH
• anizotropie * MeSH
• barva * MeSH
• bazální ganglia fyziologie   MeSH
• čelní lalok fyziologie   MeSH
• corpus callosum fyziologie   MeSH
• dospělí MeSH
• lidé středního věku MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mapování mozku metody   MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• mozek fyziologie   MeSH
• multisystémová atrofie diagnóza   patologie   MeSH
• Parkinsonova nemoc diagnóza   patologie   MeSH
• poměr signál - šum MeSH
• referenční hodnoty MeSH
• senioři nad 80 let MeSH
• senioři MeSH
• senzitivita a specificita MeSH
• software MeSH
• thalamus fyziologie   MeSH
• zdraví dobrovolníci pro lékařské studie MeSH
• zobrazování difuzních tenzorů metody   MeSH
• Check Tag
• dospělí MeSH
• lidé středního věku MeSH
• lidé MeSH
• mladiství MeSH
• mladý dospělý MeSH
• mužské pohlaví MeSH
• senioři nad 80 let MeSH
• senioři MeSH
• ženské pohlaví MeSH
• Publikační typ
• časopisecké články MeSH
• práce podpořená grantem MeSH