Automated diagnosis of Alzheimer disease using the scale-invariant feature transforms in magnetic resonance images

In this paper we present an automated method for diagnosing Alzheimer disease (AD) from brain MR images. The approach uses the scale-invariant feature transforms (SIFT) extracted from different slices in MR images for both healthy subjects and subjects with Alzheimer disease. These features are then clustered in a group of features which they can be used to transform a full 3-dimensional image from a subject to a histogram of these features. A feature selection strategy was used to select those bins from these histograms that contribute most in classifying the two groups. This was done by ranking the features using the Fisher's discriminant ratio and a feature subset selection strategy using the genetic algorithm. These selected bins of the histograms are then used for the classification of healthy/patient subjects from MR images. Support vector machines with different kernels were applied to the data for the discrimination of the two groups, namely healthy subjects and patients diagnosed by AD. The results indicate that the proposed method can be used for diagnose of AD from MR images with the accuracy of %86 for the subjects aged from 60 to 80 years old and with mild AD.