Alzheimer’s Disease Computer-Aided Diagnosis on Positron Emission Tomography Brain Images Using Image Processing Techniques

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a molecular medical imaging modality which is commonly used for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis. Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), based on medical image analysis, could help with the quantitative evaluation of brain diseases such as Alzheimer ’ s disease (AD). Ranking the effectiveness of brain volume of interest (VOI) to separate healthy or normal control (HC or NC) from AD brain PET images is presented in this book chapter. Brain images are first mapped into anatomical VOIs using an atlas. Different features including statistical, graph, or connectivity-based features are then computed on these VOIs. Top-ranked VOIs are then input into a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The developed methods are evaluated on a local database image as well as on Alzheimer ’ s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) public database and then compared to known selection feature methods. These new approaches outperformed classification results in the case of a two-group separation.