Morphometric connectivity analysis to distinguish normal, mild cognitive impaired, and Alzheimer subjects based on brain MRI

Lene Lillemark Erleben, Lauge Sørensen, Peter Mysling, Akshay Sadananda Uppinakudru Pai, Erik B. Dam, Mads Nielsen

Abstract

This work investigates a novel way of looking at the regions in the brain and their relationship as possible markers to classify normal control (NC), mild cognitive impaired (MCI), and Alzheimer Disease (AD) subjects. MRI scans from a subset of 101 subjects from the ADNI study at baseline was used for this study. 40 regions in the brain including hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus, white, and gray matter were segmented using Free Surfer. From this data, we calculated the distance between the center of mass of each region, the normalized number of voxels and the percentage volume and surface connectivity shared between the regions. These markers were used for classification using a linear discriminant analysis in a leave-one-out manner. We found that the percentage of surface and volume connectivity between regions gave a significant classification between NC and AD and borderline significant between MCI and AD even after correction for whole brain volume at baseline. The results show that the morphometric connectivity markers include more information than whole brain volume or distance markers. This suggests that one can gain additional information by combining morphometric connectivity markers with traditional volume and shape markers.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMedical Imaging 2013 : image processing
EditorsSebastien Ourselin, David R. Haynor
Number of pages6
PublisherSPIE - International Society for Optical Engineering
Publication date2013
Article number866926
ISBN (Print)9780819494436
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2013
EventMedical Imaging 2013: Image Processing - Lake Buena Vista, United States
Duration: 10 Feb 201312 Feb 2013

Conference

ConferenceMedical Imaging 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLake Buena Vista
Period10/02/201312/02/2013
SeriesProgress in Biomedical Optics and Imaging
Number36
Volume14
ISSN1605-7422

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