Discrimination of AD and normal subjects from MRI: Anatomical versus statistical regions

This work is a feature-extraction and classification study between Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal subjects. Voxel-wise morphological features of brain MRI are defined as the Jacobian determinants that measure the local volume change between each subject and a given atlas. The goal of this work is to determine the region of interest (ROI) which is best suited for classification. Two types of ROIs are considered: anatomical regions, that were automatically segmented in the atlas (amygdalae, hippocampi and lateral ventricles); and statistical regions, defined from group comparison statistical maps. Classification performance was assessed with five classifiers on 20 pairs of matched training and test groups of subjects from the ADNI database. In this study the statistical masks provided the best classification performance.

Research highlights▶ Statistical masks provide better classification performance than anatomical masks. ▶ The statistical masks allowed to highlight the heterogeneity of anatomical regions. ▶ In this study we offer a detailed anatomical interpretation of the relevant features.