  INTRODUCTION: Lateral ventricles are reliable and sensitive indicators of
brain atrophy and disease progression in behavioral variant frontotemporal
dementia (bvFTD). We aimed to investigate whether an automated tool using
ventricular features could improve diagnostic accuracy in bvFTD across
neurodegenerative diseases. METHODS: Using 678 subjects (2750 timepoints),
differences in ventricular features were assessed between bvFTD, normal
controls and other dementia cohorts. RESULTS: Ventricular antero-posterior
ratio (APR) was the only feature that was significantly different and increased
faster in bvFTD compared to all other cohorts. We achieved a 10-fold
cross-validation accuracy of 80% (77% sensitivity, 82% specificity) in
differentiating bvFTD from all other cohorts with ventricular features, and 76%
accuracy using only the single APR feature. DISCUSSION: APR could be a useful
and easy-to-implement feature to aid bvFTD diagnosis. We have made our
ventricle feature estimation and bvFTD diagnostic tool publicly available,
allowing application of our model in other studies.
