Functional Brain Image Classification Techniques for Early Alzheimer Disease Diagnosis

Abstract

Currently, the accurate diagnosis of the Alzheimer disease (AD) still remains a challenge in the clinical practice. As the number of AD patients has increased, its early diagnosis has received more attention for both social and medical reasons. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), measuring the regional cerebral blood flow, enables the diagnosis even before anatomic alterations can be observed by other imaging techniques. However, conventional evaluation of SPECT images often relies on manual reorientation, visual reading and semiquantitative analysis of certain regions of the brain. This paper evaluates different pattern classifiers including k-nearest neighbor (kNN), classification trees, support vector machines and feedforward neural networks in combination with template-based normalized mean square error (NMSE) features of several coronal slices of interest (SOI) for the development of a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for improving the early detection of the AD. The proposed system, yielding a 98.7% AD diagnosis accuracy, reports clear improvements over existing techniques such as the voxel-as-features (VAF) which yields just a 78% classification accuracy.