Temporal Progression Patterns of White-Matter Degeneration in CBS and PSP Identified with Subtype & Stage Inference (SuStaIn) [Proceedings of the 2021 Young Investigator Award]

Corticobasal syndrome (CBS) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) are sporadic atypical parkinsonian disorders associated with 4-repeat tauopathies. These neurodegenerative conditions closely overlap in their clinical information, pathology, and genetic risk factors ; therefore, it is difficult to accurately diagnose CBS and PSP. Recently, an unsupervised machine-learning technique, called Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn), has been proposed to reveal the data-driven disease phenotypes with distinct temporal progression patterns from widely available cross-sectional data. To clarify the differences in the temporal white matter (WM) degeneration patterns between CBS and PSP, this study applied SuStaIn for fractional anisotropy (FA) in regional WM, which was sensitive to WM degeneration, based on cross-sectional brain diffusion MRI (dMRI) data.