CenTauR Project
Tau positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is the most recent addition to the arsenal of tools for the in vivo assessment of neurodegenerative proteinopathies.
Differences between tracers, quantitative pipelines and regions of interest lead to disparities in PET-derived standardized uptake value ratios (SUVR) measurements which conspire to decrease reproducibility and pose a challenge when trying to compare tau outcomes across cohorts or in therapeutic trials that use different tau tracers.
The aim of CenTauR is to standardize tau PET results by establishing the location and amount of abnormality of tau aggregates in the brain, and expressing them in a universal standard scale, the units of which are termed CenTauRs.
For more information, check out the medRxiv preprint manuscript.
Download standard VOI masks:
ADDITIONAL DATA SETS
Calibration Datasets
This dataset, provided by the ADIR Lab at Mayo Clinic, is designed for use in calibrating custom tau PET software pipelines to match CenTauR units. It contains T1-w MRI and Flotaucipir tau PET images from 100 participants in the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging and Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. These participants came from two groups: a) 50 (25M+25F) adults age 65+ with a clinical diagnosis of probable Alzheimer’s disease with an amnestic phenotype, a positive PiB amyloid PET scan, and no additional neurologic diagnoses and b) 50 (25M+25F) cognitively unimpaired older adults age- and sex-matched to group A, with a negative amyloid PET scan. 65 of these individuals have included an additional follow-up scan to enable analyses of longitudinal stability. The intended use of this dataset is for a user to measure these images using both their own pipeline and the CenTauR standard (aka Centiloid standard) SPM8 pipeline, and perform linear regression to calibrate their pipeline’s units to the standard pipeline, and to CenTauR units.
Software
These files, provided by the ADIR Lab at Mayo Clinic, include the CenTauR standardized VOIs transformed to the space of several popular neuroimaging templates, and automated software that calculates SUVR and CenTauRZ units using these VOIs for input pairs of summed tau PET images and T1-weighted MRI. Two versions are included: one implements the SPM8 “Centiloid standard” pipeline of Klunk et al. 2015. The other is a SPM12-based pipeline that measures SUVR and CenTauRZ in MRI space with tissue-class masking and population-matched MCALT templates and priors. Both are pre-calibrated to output CenTauRZ units for all supported tau PET tracers.
