Correlation Between Hippocampus MRI Radiomic Features and Resting-State Intrahippocampal Functional Connectivity in Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease with main symptoms of chronic primary memory loss and cognitive impairment. The study aim was to investigate the correlation between intrahippocampal functional connectivity (FC) and MRI radiomic features in AD. A total of 67 AD patients and 44 normal controls (NCs) were enrolled in this study. Using the seed-based method of resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), the whole-brain FC with bilateral hippocampus as seed was performed, and the FC values were extracted from the bilateral hippocampus. We observed that AD patients demonstrated disruptive FC in some brain regions in the left hippocampal functional network, including right gyrus rectus, right anterior cingulate and paracingulate gyri, bilateral precuneus, bilateral angular gyrus, and bilateral middle occipital gyrus. In addition, decreased FC was detected in some brain regions in the right hippocampal functional network, including bilateral anterior cingulate and paracingulate gyri, right dorsolateral superior frontal gyrus, and right precentral gyrus. Bilateral hippocampal radiomics features were calculated and selected using the A.K. software. Finally, Pearson’s correlation analyses were conducted between these selected features and the bilateral hippocampal FC values. The results suggested that two gray level run-length matrix (RLM) radiomic features and one gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) radiomic feature weakly associated with FC values in the left hippocampus. However, there were no significant correlations between radiomic features and FC values in the right hippocampus. These findings present that the AD group showed abnormalities in the bilateral hippocampal functional network. This is a prospective study that revealed the weak correlation between the MRI radiomic features and the intrahippocampal FC in AD patients.