Cortical folding correlates to aging and Alzheimer’s Disease’s cognitive and CSF biomarkers

Structural MRI imaging biomarkers have been extensively studied, including cortical folding aspects of Alzheimer’s Disease²³ and Mild Cognitive Impairment²⁴. However, investigating cortical morphological measurements (or their combinations) is not straightforward since only a few parameters will lead to biological interpretations and adequate characterizations of the event in the study. Inspired by the cortical folding model proposed by Mota & Herculano-Houzel¹⁸, we have investigated an improved and well-motivated structural biomarker to better discriminate between diseased and healthy aged brains. The biomarker derived from the cortical folding model is the variable K, characterized by a biomechanical interpretation with very low variance across species and healthy adult humans¹⁹. We have shown that K discriminates patients with Alzheimer’s Disease from Mild Cognitive Impairment…