Amyvid was evaluated in three clinical studies that examined images from healthy adult subjects as well as subjects with a range of cognitive disorders, including some terminally ill patients who had agreed to participate in a postmortem brain donation program. All the studies were single arm studies in which subjects underwent an Amyvid injection and scan and then had images interpreted by multiple independent readers who were masked to all clinical information. Image interpretations used co-registration with CT scans when PET scans were performed on dual PET-CT scanners. 

In Study One, a semi-quantitative Amyvid image interpretation method, which is not intended for clinical use, was used by three readers to interpret images from 152 terminally ill patients, of whom 35 underwent autopsy (29 included in primary analysis). The median patient age was 85 years (range 55 to 103 years) and 14 of the patients were female. Eighteen of the patients had dementia, 9 had no cognitive impairment and 2 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI). The main study outcome was a comparison of premortem Amyvid images to the findings from a postmortem brain examination (truth standard). The semi-quantitative measures consisted of a five-point whole brain Amyvid uptake image scoring outcome that was compared to a global score of the percentage of the whole brain that contained amyloid, as determined by immunohistochemical microscopy. The percentage of postmortem cortical amyloid burden ranged from 0 to 9% and correlated with the median Amyvid scores (Spearman's rho=0.78; p<0.0001, 95% CI, 0.58 to 0.89). 

Studies Two and Three used a clinically-applicable binary image interpretation method (positive/negative) to evaluate images from a range of patients who had participated in earlier studies. The studies assessed performance characteristics (sensitivity and specificity) among subjects with a postmortem amyloid neuritic plaque density truth standard. Additionally, inter-reader and intra-reader image interpretation reproducibility was assessed among all the subjects, including subjects who lacked a postmortem truth standard. Before image interpretation, all readers underwent special training: Study Two used an in-person tutoring type of training and Study Three used an electronic media-based training method. Five trained readers interpreted images independently within each study. The brain neuritic plaque density in both studies was determined using an algorithm in which microscopic measures of highest plaque density within a brain region were averaged to produce a global brain estimate of neuritic plaque density. The global neuritic plaque density was categorized in the same manner as that for a region (Table 5), where plaques were counted on slides with modified Bielschowsky silver stained tissue sections. For purposes of determining the agreement between the in-vivo Amyvid image results and the post-mortem whole brain amyloid neuritic plaque density, Amyvid results (negative/positive) were pre-specified to correspond with specific plaque density scores, based upon a modification of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) criteria which use neuritic plaque counts as a necessary pathological feature of AD. 

Study Two examined images only from terminally ill patients who had premortem Amyvid scans and postmortem brain examinations to determine a truth standard. Among the 59 patients, 35 of whom were also in Study One, the median age was 83 years (range 47 to 103 years), half were females and most were Caucasian (93%). Twenty-nine patients had an AD clinical diagnosis, 13 had another type of dementing disorder, 12 had no history of cognitive impairment and 5 had MCI. The time interval between the Amyvid scan and death was less than one year for 46 patients and between one and two years for 13 patients. Among the subset of patients who died within one year of Amyvid scanning (a prespecified outcome), the sensitivity using the majority interpretation of the readers was 96% (95% CI: 80% to 100%) and specificity was 100% (95% CI: 78% to 100%). With the entire dataset of 59 patients, the sensitivity using the majority interpretation of the readers was 92% (95% CI: 78% to 98%) and specificity was 100% (95% CI: 80% to 100%). At autopsy, the global brain neuritic plaque density category (CERAD score, as in Table 5) was: frequent n=30; moderate n=9; sparse n=5; and none n=15. Tables 6 and 7 show the Amyvid performance characteristics among all the patients. Among the subset of patients who died within one year of Amyvid scanning (n=46; 28 positive and 18 negative based on histopathology) the median (and range) of correct read results, false negatives, and false positives were 44 (37 to 45), 1 (0 to 7), and 1 (0 to 2), respectively, for In-Person Training (Study Two); and were 43 (38 to 44), 3 (0 to 7), and 1 (0 to 2), respectively, for Electronic Media Training (Study Three). 

Study Three included images from subjects who did not have a truth standard (20 healthy volunteers, 52 patients with mild cognitive impairment, 20 patients with AD) as well as all 59 of the patients who underwent an autopsy (same patients as in Study Two) and provided a truth standard. Duplicate images of 33 patients were included within the total pool of images in order to assess intra-reader image reproducibility. Among the 151 subjects, the median age was 76 years (range 47 to 103), half were females and most were Caucasian (93.4%). Performance characteristics for patients with a truth standard are shown above (Tables 6 and 7). The major reproducibility results are shown in Table 8 for various groups of subjects. Inter-reader reproducibility analyses for all images showed an overall Fleiss' kappa statistic of 0.83 (95% CI: 0.78 to 0.88); the lower bound of the 95% CI exceeded the pre-specified success criterion (95% CI lower bound >0.58). Intra-reader reproducibility analyses showed that, between the two readings for each of the 33 patients with duplicate images, one of the five readers had complete agreement for all 33 patients, two readers had discrepant reads for a single patient, one reader had discrepant reads for two patients and another reader had discrepant reads for three patients.