Evaluation of Human Brain Aging Via Diffusion Structural Characteristics

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a novel imaging technique, which can evaluate the variation of white matter micro-structure in brain aging. Four network properties of characteristic path length (L-p), clustering coefficient (C-p), global efficiency (E-global), local efficiency (E-local) were measured for the whole brain (WB) and specific cortex between the young and the old one. The results showed that E-global decreased and L-p, C-p, E-local increased with the aging. We draw a conclusion that the chosen parameters of L-p, C-p, E-global, E-local could evaluate the white matter (WM) variation correlated with the brain aging. It used as gold markers for the changes of WB structure.