DTI and Structural MRI Classification in Alzheimer’s Disease

• Published in: Advances in molecular imaging Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 12 - 20
• Main Authors: Mesrob, Lilia, Sarazin, Marie, Hahn-Barma, Valerie, Souza, Leonardo Cruz de, Dubois, Bruno, Gallinari, Patrick, Kinkingnéhun, Serge
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.04.2012
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease
• ISSN: 2161-6728; 2161-6752
• DOI: 10.4236/ami.2012.22003

In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to individually classify patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and elderly control subjects based on diffusion tensor (DTI) and anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We propose a new multimodal measure that combines anatomical and diffusivity measures at the voxel level. Our approach relies on whole-brain parcellation into 73 anatomical regions and the extraction of multimodal characteristics in these regions. Discriminative features are identified using different feature selection (FS) methods and used in a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for individual classification. Fifteen AD patients and 16 elderly controls were discriminated using mean diffusivity alone, combination of mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy, and multimodal measures in the 73 ROIs and the overall accuracy obtained was 65.2%, 68.6% and 72% respectively. Overall accuracy reached 99% in multimodal measures when relevant regions were selected.