Automated identification of dementia using FDG-PET imaging

Parametric FDG-PET images offer the potential for automated identification of the different dementia syndromes. However, various existing image features and classifiers have their limitations in characterizing and differentiating the patterns of this disease. We reported a hybrid feature extraction, selection, and classification approach, namely, the GA-MKL algorithm, for separating patients with suspected Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia from normal controls. In this approach, we extracted three groups of features to describe the average level, spatial variation, and asymmetry of glucose metabolic rates in 116 cortical volumes. An optimal combination of features, that is, capable of classifying dementia cases was identified by a genetic algorithm- (GA-) based method. The condition of each FDG-PET study was predicted by applying the selected features to a multikernel learning (MKL) machine, in which the weighting parameter of each kernel function can be automatically estimated. We compared our approach to two state-of-the-art dementia identification algorithms on a set of 129 clinical cases and improved the performance in separating the dementia types, achieving accuracy of 94.62%. There is a very good agreement between the proposed automated technique and the diagnosis made by clinicians.