About the research

Normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) is a chronic form of hydrocephalus in older adults which is thought to be caused by obstruction of the flow of CSF. NPH typically presents with cognitive impairment, gait dysfunction and urinary incontinence (NPH triad) and may account for more than 5% of all dementia. NPH is challenging to diagnose and is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. However, unlike these other well-known causes of dementia, once diagnosed, NPH patients have the option of surgical treatment making NPH a potentially reversible dementia. We have developed novel image processing strategies that automatically segment the ventricular system from MR images of patients with ventriculomegaly into multiple compartments in an attempt to provide a noninvasive way to diagnose NPH.

Here we aim to:

1.  Optimize and evaluate our algorithm on MRIs of 1168 adults (age 66-92) with various degrees of ventriculomegaly from mild (normal aging) to severe (NPH) using gold standard manual labels. Our unique dataset from the AGES-Reykjavik Study comprises MRIs and scores for the NPH triad;
2. Compute volumetric measures to explore a novel classification of subjects with ventriculomegaly into subgroups and explore whether diagnosed NPH patients show preferential clustering in one of these groups;
3. Carry out a longitudinal study on 800 subjects to study varying rate of ventricle dilation between subjects and whether this novel metric is associated with the NPH triad.

Keywords: MRI, Image processing, Segmentation, Enlarged brain ventricles, Hydrocephalus

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