An Assessment of the Relationship between Structural and Functional Imaging of Cerebrovascular Disease and CognitionRelated Fibers In order to assess the relationship between structural and functional imaging of cerebrovascular disease and cognitionrelated fibers, this paper chooses a total of 120 patients who underwent cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) treatment at a designated hospital by this study from June 2013 to June 2018 and divides them into 3 groups according to the random number table method: vascular dementia (VaD) group, vascular cognitive impairment no dementia (VCIND) group, and noncognition impairment (NCI) group with 40 cases of patients in each group. Cognitive function measurement and imaging examination were performed for these 3 groups of patients, and the observation indicators of cognitive state examination (CSE), mental assessment scale (MAS), clock drawing test (CDT), adult intelligence scale (AIS), frontal assessment battery (FAB), verbal fluency test (VFT), trail making test (TMT), cognitive index (CI), white matter lesions (WML), third ventricle width (TVW), and frontal horn index (FHI) were tested, respectively. The results shows that the average scores of CSE, MAS, AIS, and VFT in the VaD and VCIND group are lower than those of the NCI group and the differences are statistically significant (); the average scores of FAB, TMT, and CI in the VaD group are higher than those of the VCIND group and the differences are also statistically significant (); the average scores of FHI and TVW in the VaD group are lower than those of the VCIND and NCI group with statistically significant differences (); the average scores of WML, CDT, and AIS in the VaD group are higher than those of the VCIND and NCI group with statistically significant differences (). Therefore, it is believed that the structural and functional imaging features of cerebrovascular disease are closely related to cognitionrelated fibers, and the incidence of white matter lesions is closely related to the degree of lesions and cognitive dysfunction of cerebral small vessel disease, in which a major risk factor for cognitive dysfunction in patients with small blood vessels is the severity of white matter lesions; brain imaging and neuropsychiatric function assessment can better understand the relationship between cerebrovascular disease and cognitive impairment. The results of this study provide a reference for the further research studies on the relationship between structural and functional imaging of cerebrovascular disease and cognitionrelated fibers.

Cholinergic white matter pathways make a stronger contribution to attention and memory in normal aging than cerebrovascular health and nucleus basalis of Meynert Abstract   The integrity of the cholinergic system plays a central role in cognitive decline both in normal aging and neurological disorders including Alzheimerxe2x80x99s disease and vascular cognitive impairment. Most of the previous neuroimaging research has focused on the integrity of the cholinergic basal forebrain, or its subregion the nucleus basalis of Meynert (NBM). Tractography using diffusion tensor imaging data may enable modelling of the NBM white matter projections. We investigated the contribution of NBM volume, NBM white matter projections, small vessel disease (SVD), and age to performance in attention and memory in 262 cognitively normal individuals (39xe2x80x9377 years of age, 53% female). We developed a multimodal MRI pipeline for NBM segmentation and diffusionbased tracking of NBM white matter projections, and computed white matter hypointensities (WMhypo) as a marker of SVD. We successfully tracked pathways that closely resemble the spatial layout of the cholinergic system as seen in previous postmortem and DTI tractography studies. We found that high WMhypo load was associated with older age, male sex, and lower performance in attention and memory. A high WMhypo load was also associated with lower integrity of the cholinergic system above and beyond the effect of age. In a multivariate model, age and integrity of NBM white matter projections were stronger contributors than WMhypo load and NBM volume to performance in attention and memory. We conclude that the integrity of NBM white matter projections plays a fundamental role in cognitive aging. This and other modern neuroimaging methods offer new opportunities to reevaluate the cholinergic hypothesis of cognitive aging.