Fig. 6: Study flowchart of data processing and analysis.
From: Identifying brain degeneration patterns in early-stage Parkinson’s disease: a multimodal MRI study
(Step1) A total of 376 individuals (294 in discovery dataset and 82 in validation dataset) were enrolled in this study. Imaging data from three modalities and both motor and non-motor clinical features at baseline and follow-up were collected; (Step2) All imaging features were first corrected for covariates using linear regression, then subjected to dimensionality reduction through principal component analysis for hierarchical clustering analysis, thereby obtaining imaging subtypes of PD; (Step3) The differences of clinical/imaging variables, and longitudinal progression were assessed between subtypes; the correlations between imaging features and the clinical severity were analyzed. MRI magnetic resonance imaging, QSM quantitative susceptibility mapping, REM rapid eye movement, FA fractional anisotropy, PCA principal component analysis, UPDRS unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale, MMSE mini-mental state examination.
