Automated, high accuracy classification of Parkinsonian disorders: a pattern recognition approach

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy (MSA) and idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (IPD) can be clinically indistinguishable, especially in the early stages, despite distinct patterns of molecular pathology. Structural neuroimaging holds promise for providing objective biomarkers for discriminating these diseases at the single subject level but all studies to date have reported incomplete separation of disease groups. In this study, we employed multi-class pattern recognition to assess the value of anatomical patterns derived from a widely available structural neuroimaging sequence for automated classification of these disorders. To achieve this, 17 patients with PSP, 14 with IPD and 19 with MSA were scanned using structural MRI along with 19 healthy controls (HCs). An advanced probabilistic pattern recognition approach was employed to evaluate the diagnostic value of several pre-defined anatomical patterns for discriminating the disorders, including: (i) a subcortical motor network; (ii) each of its component regions and (iii) the whole brain. All disease groups could be discriminated simultaneously with high accuracy using the subcortical motor network. The region providing the most accurate predictions overall was the midbrain/brainstem, which discriminated all disease groups from one another and from HCs. The subcortical network also produced more accurate predictions than the whole brain and all of its constituent regions. PSP was accurately predicted from the midbrain/brainstem, cerebellum and all basal ganglia compartments; MSA from the midbrain/brainstem and cerebellum and IPD from the midbrain/brainstem only. This study demonstrates that automated analysis of structural MRI can accurately predict diagnosis in individual patients with Parkinsonian disorders, and identifies distinct patterns of regional atrophy particularly useful for this process

Testing the Potential Application of Simulated Multispectral Data in Discriminating Tree Species in Taita Hills

Peer reviewe

Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis Using Landmark-Based Features From Longitudinal Structural MR Images

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been proven to be an effective tool for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis. While conventional MRI-based AD diagnosis typically uses images acquired at a single time point, a longitudinal study is more sensitive in detecting early pathological changes of AD, making it more favorable for accurate diagnosis. In general, there are two challenges faced in MRI-based diagnosis. First, extracting features from structural MR images requires time-consuming nonlinear registration and tissue segmentation, whereas the longitudinal study with involvement of more scans further exacerbates the computational costs. Moreover, the inconsistent longitudinal scans (i.e., different scanning time points and also the total number of scans) hinder extraction of unified feature representations in longitudinal studies. In this paper, we propose a landmark-based feature extraction method for AD diagnosis using longitudinal structural MR images, which does not require nonlinear registration or tissue segmentation in the application stage and is also robust to inconsistencies among longitudinal scans. Specifically, 1) the discriminative landmarks are first automatically discovered from the whole brain using training images, and then efficiently localized using a fast landmark detection method for testing images, without the involvement of any nonlinear registration and tissue segmentation; 2) high-level statistical spatial features and contextual longitudinal features are further extracted based on those detected landmarks, which can characterize spatial structural abnormalities and longitudinal landmark variations. Using these spatial and longitudinal features, a linear support vector machine (SVM) is finally adopted to distinguish AD subjects or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects from healthy controls (HCs). Experimental results on the ADNI database demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of the proposed method, with classification accuracies of 88.30% for AD vs. HC and 79.02% for MCI vs. HC, respectively

Predictive models based on Support Vector Machines: whole-brain versus regional analysis of structural MRI in the Alzheimer’s disease

Decision-making systems trained on structural magnetic resonance imaging data of subjects affected by the Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls (CTRL) are becoming widespread prognostic tools for subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study compares the performances of three classification methods based on support vector machines (SVMs), using as initial sets of brain voxels (ie, features): (1) the segmented grey matter (GM); (2) regions of interest (ROIs) by voxel-wise t-test filtering; (3) parceled ROIs, according to prior knowledge. The recursive feature elimination (RFE) is applied in all cases to investigate whether feature reduction improves the classification accuracy. We analyzed more than 600 AD Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) subjects, training the SVMs on the AD/CTRL dataset, and evaluating them on a trial MCI dataset. The classification performance, evaluated as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), reaches AUC = (88.9 ± .5)% in 20-fold cross-validation on the AD/CTRL dataset, when the GM is classified as a whole. The highest discrimination accuracy between MCI converters and nonconverters is achieved when the SVM-RFE is applied to the whole GM: with AUC reaching (70.7 ± .9)%, it outperforms both ROI-based approaches in predicting the AD conversion

Subspace Regularized Sparse Multitask Learning for Multiclass Neurodegenerative Disease Identification

The high feature-dimension and low sample-size problem is one of the major challenges in the study of computer-aided Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) diagnosis. To circumvent this problem, feature selection and subspace learning have been playing core roles in literature. Generally, feature selection methods are preferable in clinical applications due to their ease for interpretation, but subspace learning methods can usually achieve more promising results. In this paper, we combine two different methodological approaches to discriminative feature selection in a unified framework. Specifically, we utilize two subspace learning methods, namely, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Locality Preserving Projection (LPP), which have proven their effectiveness in a variety of fields, to select class-discriminative and noise-resistant features. Unlike previous methods in neuroimaging studies that mostly focused on a binary classification, the proposed feature selection method is further applicable for multi-class classification in AD diagnosis. Extensive experiments on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods

Automated, High Accuracy Classification of Parkinsonian Disorders: A Pattern Recognition Approach

Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy (MSA) and idiopathic Parkinson's disease (IPD) can be clinically indistinguishable, especially in the early stages, despite distinct patterns of molecular pathology. Structural neuroimaging holds promise for providing objective biomarkers for discriminating these diseases at the single subject level but all studies to date have reported incomplete separation of disease groups. In this study, we employed multi-class pattern recognition to assess the value of anatomical patterns derived from a widely available structural neuroimaging sequence for automated classification of these disorders. To achieve this, 17 patients with PSP, 14 with IPD and 19 with MSA were scanned using structural MRI along with 19 healthy controls (HCs). An advanced probabilistic pattern recognition approach was employed to evaluate the diagnostic value of several pre-defined anatomical patterns for discriminating the disorders, including: (i) a subcortical motor network; (ii) each of its component regions and (iii) the whole brain. All disease groups could be discriminated simultaneously with high accuracy using the subcortical motor network. The region providing the most accurate predictions overall was the midbrain/brainstem, which discriminated all disease groups from one another and from HCs. The subcortical network also produced more accurate predictions than the whole brain and all of its constituent regions. PSP was accurately predicted from the midbrain/brainstem, cerebellum and all basal ganglia compartments; MSA from the midbrain/brainstem and cerebellum and IPD from the midbrain/brainstem only. This study demonstrates that automated analysis of structural MRI can accurately predict diagnosis in individual patients with Parkinsonian disorders, and identifies distinct patterns of regional atrophy particularly useful for this process

An Ensemble-of-Classifiers Based Approach for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease: Classification Using Structural Features of Brain Images

Structural brain imaging is playing a vital role in identification of changes that occur in brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease. This paper proposes an automated image processing based approach for the identification of AD from MRI of the brain. The proposed approach is novel in a sense that it has higher specificity/accuracy values despite the use of smaller feature set as compared to existing approaches. Moreover, the proposed approach is capable of identifying AD patients in early stages. The dataset selected consists of 85 age and gender matched individuals from OASIS database. The features selected are volume of GM, WM, and CSF and size of hippocampus. Three different classification models (SVM, MLP, and J48) are used for identification of patients and controls. In addition, an ensemble of classifiers, based on majority voting, is adopted to overcome the error caused by an independent base classifier. Ten-fold cross validation strategy is applied for the evaluation of our scheme. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of proposed approach, individual features and combination of features are fed to individual classifiers and ensemble based classifier. Using size of left hippocampus as feature, the accuracy achieved with ensemble of classifiers is 93.75%, with 100% specificity and 87.5% sensitivity

Decoding human mental states by whole-head EEG+fNIRS during category fluency task performance

Objective: Concurrent scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which we refer to as EEG+fNIRS, promises greater accuracy than the individual modalities while remaining nearly as convenient as EEG. We sought to quantify the hybrid system's ability to decode mental states and compare it with unimodal systems. Approach: We recorded from healthy volunteers taking the category fluency test and applied machine learning techniques to the data. Main results: EEG+fNIRS's decoding accuracy was greater than that of its subsystems, partly due to the new type of neurovascular features made available by hybrid data. Significance: Availability of an accurate and practical decoding method has potential implications for medical diagnosis, brain-computer interface design, and neuroergonomics