Probing gray matter microstructure with diffusion MRI in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease: A comparison of methods

Gray matter microstructural changes appear prior to macrostructural changes in Alzheimer’s disease, these changes can be probed by diffusion MRI. However, different methods can be used to extract metrics in the thin cortical ribbon. The influence of the choice of method on the results has not been investigated yet. In this work, two different methods of extracting diffusion metrics in the cortex are compared, a surface-based approach and gray matter based spatial statistics (GBSS). We improve upon GBSS and show it now yields comparable results to a surface-based method.