Machine learning for the assessment of Alzheimer's disease through DTI

Eufemia Lella; Nicola Amoroso; Roberto Bellotti; Domenico Diacono; Marianna La Rocca; Tommaso Maggipinto; Alfonso Monaco; Sabina Tangaro

doi:10.1117/12.2274140

19 September 2017 Machine learning for the assessment of Alzheimer's disease through DTI

Eufemia Lella, Nicola Amoroso, Roberto Bellotti, Domenico Diacono, Marianna La Rocca, Tommaso Maggipinto, Alfonso Monaco, Sabina Tangaro

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 10396, Applications of Digital Image Processing XL; 1039619 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274140
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2017, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Digital imaging techniques have found several medical applications in the development of computer aided detection systems, especially in neuroimaging. Recent advances in Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) aim to discover biological markers for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), one of the most widespread neurodegenerative disorders. We explore here how different supervised classification models provide a robust support to the diagnosis of AD patients. We use DTI measures, assessing the structural integrity of white matter (WM) fiber tracts, to reveal patterns of disrupted brain connectivity. In particular, we provide a voxel-wise measure of fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD), thus identifying the regions of the brain mostly affected by neurodegeneration, and then computing intensity features to feed supervised classification algorithms. In particular, we evaluate the accuracy of discrimination of AD patients from healthy controls (HC) with a dataset of 80 subjects (40 HC, 40 AD), from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neurodegenerative Initiative (ADNI). In this study, we compare three state-of-the-art classification models: Random Forests, Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We use a repeated five-fold cross validation framework with nested feature selection to perform a fair comparison between these algorithms and evaluate the information content they provide. Results show that AD patterns are well localized within the brain, thus DTI features can support the AD diagnosis.

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Eufemia Lella, Nicola Amoroso, Roberto Bellotti, Domenico Diacono, Marianna La Rocca, Tommaso Maggipinto, Alfonso Monaco, and Sabina Tangaro "Machine learning for the assessment of Alzheimer's disease through DTI", Proc. SPIE 10396, Applications of Digital Image Processing XL, 1039619 (19 September 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2274140

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