Diagnosis of brain abnormality using both structural and functional MR images

A number of neurological diseases are associated with structural and functional alterations in the brain. This paper presents a method of using both structural and functional MR images for brain disease diagnosis, by machine learning and high-dimensional template warping. First, a high-dimensional template warping technique is used to compute morphological and functional representations for each individual brain in a template space, within a mass preserving framework. Then, statistical regional features are extracted to reduce the dimensionality of morphological and functional representations, as well as to achieve the robustness to registration errors and inter-subject variations. Finally, the most discriminative regional features are selected by a hybrid feature selection method for brain classification, using a nonlinear support vector machine. The proposed method has been applied to classifying the brain images of prenatally cocaine-exposed young adults from those of socioeconomically matched controls, resulting in 91.8% correct classification rate using a leave-one-out cross-validation. Comparison results show the effectiveness of our method and also the importance of simultaneously using both structural and functional images for brain classification.