Brain metabolic connectome classify mild cognitive impairment into Alzheimer's dementia^.

Identifying whether patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are converting to Alzheimer's disease (AD) is clinically important, but there are still controversies and doubts. We aimed to develop a novel connectome approach which could accurately and precisely predict whether MCI patients are converted to AD using ¹⁸F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET). In our study, FDG-PET images were acquired from 84 patients with MCI who converted to AD within 48 months and 109 patients with MCI without conversion within 48 months from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. The experimental results showed that the classification performance about whether an MCI patient would convert to AD were 92.1%, 87.1%, 94.4% and 0.95 (Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity and AUC). The abnormality of functional connection was located at Middle frontal gyrus, Posterior cingulate gyrus, Precentral gyrus, Precuneus and Temporal lobe. These finding showed the brain connectome as a practical approach for developing predictive neuroimaging biomarker.