Effects of different covariates and contrasts on classification of Parkinson's disease using structural MRI

Three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (3D-MRI) has been effectively used in the diagnosis of progressive neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's disease (PD). Pre-processing of 3D-MRI scans plays an important role for post-processing. In this paper, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) technique is used to compare morphological dierences of PDs versus healthy controls (HCs) in gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM). The effects of using different covariates (i.e. total intracranial volume (TIV), age, sex and combination of them) as well as two different hypotheses, t-contrast and f-contrast, on classification of PD from HCs have been studied. 3D masks for GM as well as WM tissues are obtained separately by utilizing local differences between PD and HC and using the two sample t-test method. PCA is used to perform dimensionality reduction and SVM is used for classification. The proposed method is evaluated on 40 PDs and 40 HCs obtained from the ppmi dataset. The classification results using f-contrast show a superior performance for GM, WM, and the combination of GM as well as WM compared to t-contrast. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that using TIV as a covariate provides more robust results for PD classification compared to other covariate settings. The highest accuracies of distinguishing between PDs and HCs are obtained when TIV is used as a covariate and f-contrast is used for model building: 73.75%, 72.50%, and 93.7% for GM, WM, and the combination of them, respectively.