Imaging-based early diagnosis of Alzheimer Disease (AD) has become an
effective approach, especially by using nuclear medicine imaging techniques
such as Positron Emission Topography (PET). In various literature it has been
found that PET images can be better modeled as signals (e.g. uptake of
florbetapir) defined on a network (non-Euclidean) structure which is governed
by its underlying graph patterns of pathological progression and metabolic
connectivity. In order to effectively apply deep learning framework for PET
image analysis to overcome its limitation on Euclidean grid, we develop a
solution for 3D PET image representation and analysis under a generalized,
graph-based CNN architecture (PETNet), which analyzes PET signals defined on a
group-wise inferred graph structure. Computations in PETNet are defined in
non-Euclidean, graph (network) domain, as it performs feature extraction by
convolution operations on spectral-filtered signals on the graph and pooling
operations based on hierarchical graph clustering. Effectiveness of the PETNet
is evaluated on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset,
which shows improved performance over both deep learning and other machine
learning-based methods.Comment: Jiaming Guo, Wei Qiu and Xiang Li contribute equally to this wor