Multimodal and Multiscale Deep Neural Networks for the Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease using structural MR and FDG-PET images
This addresses the need for earlier diagnosis in Alzheimer's Disease patients, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing multimodal approaches.
The paper tackled the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease by combining structural MRI and FDG-PET images, achieving 85.68% accuracy in predicting conversion to AD within three years.
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common first symptom before the conversion to clinical impairment where the individual becomes unable to perform activities of daily living independently. Although there is currently no treatment available, the earlier a conclusive diagnosis is made, the earlier the potential for interventions to delay or perhaps even prevent progression to full-blown AD. Neuroimaging scans acquired from MRI and metabolism images obtained by FDG-PET provide in-vivo view into the structure and function (glucose metabolism) of the living brain. It is hypothesized that combining different image modalities could better characterize the change of human brain and result in a more accuracy early diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we proposed a novel framework to discriminate normal control(NC) subjects from subjects with AD pathology (AD and NC, MCI subjects convert to AD in future). Our novel approach utilizing a multimodal and multiscale deep neural network was found to deliver a 85.68\% accuracy in the prediction of subjects within 3 years to conversion. Cross validation experiments proved that it has better discrimination ability compared with results in existing published literature.