Multi-template based brain morphometric pattern analysis using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been recently proposed for automatic diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its prodromal stage (i.e., mild cognitive impairment or MCI). In such methods, multi-view morphological patterns generated from multiple templates are used as feature representation for brain images. However, existing multi-template based methods often simply assume that each class is represented by a specific type of data distribution (i.e., a single cluster), while in reality the underlying data distribution is actually not pre-known. In this paper, we propose an inherent structure based multi-view leaning (ISML) method using multiple templates for AD/MCI classification. Specifically, we first extract multi-view feature representations for subjects using multiple selected templates, and then cluster subjects within a specific class into several sub-classes (i.e., clusters) in each view space. Then, we encode those sub-classes with unique codes by considering both their original class information and their own distribution information, followed by a multi-task feature selection model. Finally, we learn an ensemble of view-specific support vector machine (SVM) classifiers based on their respectively selected features in each view, and fuse their results to draw the final decision. Experimental results on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database demonstrate that our method achieves promising results for AD/MCI classification, compared to the state-of-the-art multi-template based methods
