Classification of Alzheimer's disease using regional saliency maps from brain MR volumes

Accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) from structural Magnetic Resonance (MR) images is difficult due to the complex alteration of patterns in brain anatomy that could indicate the presence or absence of the pathology. Currently, an effective approach that allows to interpret the disease in terms of global and local changes is not available in the clinical practice. In this paper, we propose an approach for classification of brain MR images, based on finding pathology-related patterns through the identification of regional structural changes. The approach combines a probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) technique, which allows to identify image regions through latent topics inferred from the brain MR slices, with a bottom-up Graph-Based Visual Saliency (GBVS) model, which calculates maps of relevant information per region. Regional saliency maps are finally combined into a single map on each slice, obtaining a master saliency map of each brain volume. The proposed approach includes a one-to-one comparison of the saliency maps which feeds a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, to group test subjects into normal or probable AD subjects. A set of 156 brain MR images from healthy (76) and pathological (80) subjects, splitted into a training set (10 non-demented and 10 demented subjects) and one testing set (136 subjects), was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Preliminary results show that the proposed method reaches a maximum classification accuracy of 87.21%