Comparison of Different Hypotheses Regarding the Spread of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Markov Random Fields and Multimodal Imaging

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by a cascade of pathological processes that can be assessed in vivo using different neuroimaging methods. Recent research suggests a systematic sequence of pathogenic events on a global biomarker level, but little is known about the associations and dependencies of distinct lesion patterns on a regional level. Markov random fields are a probabilistic graphical modeling approach that represent the interaction between individual random variables by an undirected graph. We propose the novel application of this approach to study the interregional associations and dependencies between multimodal imaging markers of AD pathology and to compare different hy…