Discovering regional pathological patterns in brain MRI

Complex pathological brain patterns generally are found in neurodegenerative diseases which can be correlated with different clinical onsets of a particular pathology. Currently, an objective method that aids to determine such signs, in terms of global and local changes, is not available in clinical practice and the whole interpretation is dependent on the radiologist's skills. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method that analyzes the brain structure under a multidimensional frame and highlights relevant brain patterns. An association of such patterns with the disease is herein evaluated in three classification tasks, involving probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients and normal subjects (NC). A set of 75 brain MR images from NC subjects (25), MCI (25) and probable AD (25) patients, split into training (15 subjects) and testing (60 subjects) sets, was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Preliminary results show that the proposed method reaches a maximum classification accuracy of 80% when discriminating AD patients from NC, of 75% for classification of MCI patients from NC.