A Personalized Computer-Aided Diagnosis System for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) Using Structural MRI (sMRI)

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 21; no. 16; p. 5416
• Main Authors: El-Gamal, Fatma El-Zahraa A., Elmogy, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ali, Shalaby, Ahmed, Switala, Andrew E., Ghazal, Mohammed, Soliman, Hassan, Atwan, Ahmed, Alghamdi, Norah Saleh, Barnes, Gregory Neal, El-Baz, Ayman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 11-08-2021; MDPI
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease; Brain research; Central nervous system; Classification; computer-aided diagnosis; Diagnosis; Discriminant analysis; Impairment; Magnetic resonance imaging; Medical imaging; mild cognitive impairment; Neuropsychology; Older people; Pathology; Patients; personalized diagnosis; sMRI; Support vector machines
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s21165416

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that targets the central nervous system (CNS). Statistics show that more than five million people in America face this disease. Several factors hinder diagnosis at an early stage, in particular, the divergence of 10–15 years between the onset of the underlying neuropathological changes and patients becoming symptomatic. This study surveyed patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), who were at risk of conversion to AD, with a local/regional-based computer-aided diagnosis system. The described system allowed for visualization of the disorder’s effect on cerebral cortical regions individually. The CAD system consists of four steps: (1) preprocess the scans and extract the cortex, (2) reconstruct the cortex and extract shape-based features, (3) fuse the extracted features, and (4) perform two levels of diagnosis: cortical region-based followed by global. The experimental results showed an encouraging performance of the proposed system when compared with related work, with a maximum accuracy of 86.30%, specificity 88.33%, and sensitivity 84.88%. Behavioral and cognitive correlations identified brain regions involved in language, executive function/cognition, and memory in MCI subjects, which regions are also involved in the neuropathology of AD.