In this work, different techniques for the automated extraction of biomarkers for
Alzheimer's disease (AD) from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are proposed.
The described work forms part of PredictAD (www.predictad.eu), a joined
European research project aiming at the identification of a unified biomarker for AD
combining different clinical and imaging measurements. Two different approaches are
followed in this thesis towards the extraction of MRI-based biomarkers: (I) the extraction
of traditional morphological biomarkers based on neuronatomical structures
and (II) the extraction of data-driven biomarkers applying machine-learning techniques.
A novel method for a unified and automated estimation of structural volumes
and volume changes is proposed. Furthermore, a new technique that allows the low-dimensional
representation of a high-dimensional image population for data analysis
and visualization is described. All presented methods are evaluated on images from
the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), providing a large and diverse
clinical database. A rigorous evaluation of the power of all identified biomarkers to
discriminate between clinical subject groups is presented. In addition, the agreement
of automatically derived volumes with reference labels as well as the power of the
proposed method to measure changes in a subject's atrophy rate are assessed. The
proposed methods compare favorably to state-of-the art techniques in neuroimaging
in terms of accuracy, robustness and run-time
