Neurocognitive disorder detection based on feature vectors extracted from VBM analysis of structural MRI

Dementia is a growing concern due to the aging process of the western societies. Non-invasive detection is therefore a high priority research endeavor. In this paper we report results of classification systems applied to the feature vectors obtained by a feature extraction method computed on structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) volumes for the detection of two neurological disorders with cognitive impairment: myotonic dystrophy of type 1 (MD1) and Alzheimer disease (AD). The feature extraction process is based on the voxel clusters detected by voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis of sMRI upon a set of patient and control subjects. This feature extraction process is specific for each kind of disease and is grounded on the findings obtained by medical experts. The 10-fold cross-validation results of several statistical and neural network based classification algorithms trained and tested on these features show high specificity and moderate sensitivity of the classifiers, suggesting that the approach is better suited for rejecting than for detecting early stages of the diseases.