Unsupervised [18F]Flortaucipir cutoffs for tau positivity and staging in Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

Abstract Purpose Several [18F]Flortaucipir cutoffs have been proposed for tau PET positivity (T+) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but none were data-driven. The aim of this study was to establish and validate unsupervised T+ cutoffs by applying Gaussian mixture models (GMM). Methods Amyloid negative (A−) cognitively normal (CN) and amyloid positive (A+) AD-related dementia (ADRD) subjects from ADNI (n=269) were included. ADNI (n=475) and Geneva Memory Clinic (GMC) cohorts (n=98) were used for validation. GMM-based cutoffs were extracted for the temporal meta-ROI, and validated against previously published cutoffs and visual rating. Results GMM-based cutoffs classified less subjects as T+, mainly in the A− CN (<3.4% vs >28.5%) and A+ CN (<14.5% vs >42.9%) groups and showed higher agreement with visual rating (ICC=0.91 vs ICC<0.62) than published cutoffs. Conclusion We provided reliable data-driven [18F]Flortaucipir cutoffs for in vivo T+ detection in AD. These cutoffs might be useful to select participants in clinical and research studies.