Fractal Analysis of Brain CT Image in Senile Dementia of Alzheimer Type

Brain atrophy in CT images is often found in patients with Senile dementia of Alzheimer type(AD), but occasionally it isn’t prominent in some patients with symptoms of dementia. On the contrary, some patients with few symptoms of dementia sometimes show a remarkable atrophy in their brain CT. This is one of the reasons why the diagnosis of AD in the early stage is difficult. Therefore, it is very important that we develop an explicit method to measure the atrophy objectively. Fractal analysis is a method to estimate the complexity of morphology. In this report, we applied this analysis to patients with AD and investigated the relationship between the fractal dimension of cortex surface and the score of HDS-R (Revised version of Hasegawa’s dementia scale). As a result, we could not find any significant difference between them, unfortunately, in this preliminary study. Further study is needed, but we think that it will be possible to distinguish fine brain atrophy.