Computer-aided differential diagnosis system for Alzheimer’s disease based on machine learning with functional and morphological image features in magnetic resonance imaging

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a dementing disorder and one of the major public health problems in countries with greater longevity. The cerebral cortical thickness and cerebral blood flow (CBF), which are considered as morphological and functional image features, respectively, could be decreased in specific cerebral regions of patients with dementia of Alzheimer type. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop a computer-aided classification system for AD patients based on machine learning with the morphological and functional image features derived from a magnetic resonance (MR) imaging system. The cortical thicknesses in ten cerebral regions were derived as morphological features by using gradient vector trajectories in fuzzy membership images. Functional CBF maps were measured with an arterial spin labeling technique, and ten regional CBF values were obtained by registration between the CBF map and Talairach atlas using an affine transformation and a free form deformation. We applied two systems based on an arterial neural network (ANN) and a support vector machine (SVM), which were trained with 4 morphological and 6 functional image features, to 15 AD patients and 15 clinically normal (CN) subjects for classification of AD. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) values for the two systems based on the ANN and SVM with both image?features were 0.901 and 0.915, respectively. The AUC values for the ANN-and SVM-based systems with the morphological features were 0.710 and 0.660, respectively, and those with the functional features were 0.878 and 0.903, respectively. Our preliminary results suggest that the proposed method may have potential for assisting radiologists in the differential diagnosis of AD patients by using morphological and functional image features.

Automated measurement of three-dimensional cerebral cortical thickness in Alzheimer’s patients using localized gradient vector trajectory in fuzzy membership maps

Our purpose in this study was to develop an automated method for measuring three-dimensional (3D) cerebral cortical thicknesses in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using magnetic resonance (MR) images. Our proposed method consists of mainly three steps. First, a brain parenchymal region was segmented based on brain model matching. Second, a 3D fuzzy membership map for a cerebral cortical region was created by applying a fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm to T1-weighted MR images. Third, cerebral cortical thickness was three- dimensionally measured on each cortical surface voxel by using a localized gradient vector trajectory in a fuzzy membership map. Spherical models with 3 mm artificial cortical regions, which were produced using three noise levels of 2%, 5%, and 10%, were employed to evaluate the proposed method. We also applied the proposed method to T1-weighted images obtained from 20 cases, i.e., 10 clinically diagnosed AD cases and 10 clinically normal (CN) subjects. The thicknesses of the 3 mm artificial cortical regions for spherical models with noise levels of 2%, 5%, and 10% were measured by the proposed method as 2.953 ± 0.342, 2.953 ± 0.342 and 2.952 ± 0.343 mm, respectively. Thus the mean thicknesses for the entire cerebral lobar region were 3.1 ± 0.4 mm for AD patients and 3.3 ± 0.4 mm for CN subjects, respectively (p < 0.05). The proposed method could be feasible for measuring the 3D cerebral cortical thickness on individual cortical surface voxels as an atrophy feature in AD.