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.