Identifying patients with Alzheimer's disease using resting-state fMRI and graph theory

Study of brain network on the basis of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has provided promising results to investigate changes in connectivity among different brain regions because of diseases. Graph theory can efficiently characterize different aspects of the brain network by calculating measures of integration and segregation.

In this study, we combine graph theoretical approaches with advanced machine learning methods to study functional brain network alteration in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Support vector machine (SVM) was used to explore the ability of graph measures in diagnosis of AD. We applied our method on the resting-state fMRI data of twenty patients with AD and twenty age and gender matched healthy subjects. The data were preprocessed and each subject's graph was constructed by parcellation of the whole brain into 90 distinct regions using the automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas. The graph measures were then calculated and used as the discriminating features. Extracted network-based features were fed to different feature selection algorithms to choose most significant features. In addition to the machine learning approach, statistical analysis was performed on connectivity matrices to find altered connectivity patterns in patients with AD.

Using the selected features, we were able to accurately classify patients with AD from healthy subjects with accuracy of 100%.

Results of this study show that pattern recognition and graph of brain network, on the basis of the resting state fMRI data, can efficiently assist in the diagnosis of AD.

Classification based on the resting-state fMRI can be used as a non-invasive and automatic tool to diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.