Classification of patients with parkinsonian syndromes using medical imaging and artificial intelligence algorithms

The distinction of Parkinsonian Syndromes (PS) is challenging due to similarities of symptoms and signs at early stages of disease. Thus, the need of accurate methods for differential diagnosis at those early stages has emerged. To improve the evaluation of medical images, artificial intelligence turns out to be a useful tool. Parkinson’s Disease, the commonest PS, is characterized by the degeneration of dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra which is detected by the dopamine transporter scan (DaTscanTM), a single photon-emission tomography (SPECT) exam that uses of a radiotracer that binds dopamine receptors. In fact, by using such exam it was possible to identify a sub-group of PD patients known as “Scans without evidence of dopaminergic deficit” (SWEDD) that present a normal exam, unlike PD patients. In this study, an approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) was proposed for classifying PD patients, SWEDD patients and healthy subjects using SPECT and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. Then, these images were divided into subsets of slices in the axial view that contains particular regions of interest since 2D images are the norm in clinical practice. The classifier evaluation was performed with Cohen’s Kappa and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. The results obtained allow to conclude that the CNN using imaging information of the Basal Ganglia and the mesencephalon was able to distinguish PD patients from healthy subjects since achieved 97.4% accuracy using MRI and 92.4% accuracy using SPECT, and PD from SWEDD with 97.3% accuracy using MRI and 93.3% accuracy using SPECT. Nonetheless, using the same approach, it was not possible to discriminate SWEDD patients from healthy subjects (60% accuracy) using DaTscanTM and MRI. These results allow to conclude that this approach may be a useful tool to aid in PD diagnosis in the future

An Unsupervised Learning Model for Deformable Medical Image Registration

We present a fast learning-based algorithm for deformable, pairwise 3D medical image registration. Current registration methods optimize an objective function independently for each pair of images, which can be time-consuming for large data. We define registration as a parametric function, and optimize its parameters given a set of images from a collection of interest. Given a new pair of scans, we can quickly compute a registration field by directly evaluating the function using the learned parameters. We model this function using a convolutional neural network (CNN), and use a spatial transform layer to reconstruct one image from another while imposing smoothness constraints on the registration field. The proposed method does not require supervised information such as ground truth registration fields or anatomical landmarks. We demonstrate registration accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art 3D image registration, while operating orders of magnitude faster in practice. Our method promises to significantly speed up medical image analysis and processing pipelines, while facilitating novel directions in learning-based registration and its applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/balakg/voxelmorph .Comment: 9 pages, in CVPR 201

Parkinson's Disease Detection Using Ensemble Architecture from MR Images

Parkinson's Disease(PD) is one of the major nervous system disorders that affect people over 60. PD can cause cognitive impairments. In this work, we explore various approaches to identify Parkinson's using Magnetic Resonance (MR) T1 images of the brain. We experiment with ensemble architectures combining some winning Convolutional Neural Network models of ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) and propose two architectures. We find that detection accuracy increases drastically when we focus on the Gray Matter (GM) and White Matter (WM) regions from the MR images instead of using whole MR images. We achieved an average accuracy of 94.7\% using smoothed GM and WM extracts and one of our proposed architectures. We also perform occlusion analysis and determine which brain areas are relevant in the architecture decision making process

Application of deep learning in detecting neurological disorders from magnetic resonance images: a survey on the detection of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia

Neuroimaging, in particular magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been playing an important role in understanding brain functionalities and its disorders during the last couple of decades. These cutting-edge MRI scans, supported by high-performance computational tools and novel ML techniques, have opened up possibilities to unprecedentedly identify neurological disorders. However, similarities in disease phenotypes make it very difficult to detect such disorders accurately from the acquired neuroimaging data. This article critically examines and compares performances of the existing deep learning (DL)-based methods to detect neurological disorders—focusing on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia—from MRI data acquired using different modalities including functional and structural MRI. The comparative performance analysis of various DL architectures across different disorders and imaging modalities suggests that the Convolutional Neural Network outperforms other methods in detecting neurological disorders. Towards the end, a number of current research challenges are indicated and some possible future research directions are provided

Generalization Performance of the Deep Learning Models in Neurodegenerative Disease Classification.

Over the past decade, machine learning gained considerable attention from the scientific community and has progressed rapidly as a result. Given its ability to detect subtle and complicated patterns, deep learning (DL) has been utilized widely in neuroimaging studies for medical data analysis and automated diagnostics with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we question the remarkable accuracies of the best performing models by assessing generalization performance of the stateof-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) models on the classification of two most common neurodegenerative diseases, namely Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Parkinson’s Disease (PD) using MRI. We demonstrate the impact of the data division strategy on the model performances by comparing the results derived from two different split approaches. We first evaluated the performance of the CNN models by dividing the dataset at the subject level in which all of the MRI slices of a patient are put into either training or test set. We then observed that pooling together all slices prior to applying cross-validation, as erroneously done in a number of previous studies, leads to inflated accuracies by as much as 26% for the classification of the diseases