Analysis of SPECT brain images for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease based on NMF for feature extraction

This letter presents a novel computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) technique for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) analysis applied to single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images. A baseline normalized SPECT database containing normalized data for both AD patients and healthy reference patients is selected for this study. The SPECT database is analyzed by applying the Fisher discriminant ratio (FDR) for feature selection and NMF for feature extraction of relevant components of each subject. The main goal of these preprocessing steps is to reduce the large dimensionality of the input data and to relieve the so called “curse of dimensionality” problem. The resulting NMF-transformed set of data, which contains a reduced number of features, is classified by means of a support vector machines based classification technique (SVM). The proposed NMF + SVM method yields up to 94% classification accuracy, with high sensitivity and specificity values (upper than 90%), becoming an accurate method for SPECT image classification. For the sake of completeness, comparison between another recently developed principal component analysis (PCA) plus SVM method and the proposed method is also provided, yielding results for the NMF + SVM approach that outperform the behavior of the reference PCA + SVM or conventional voxel-as-feature (VAF) plus SVM methods.