1. MR image texture analysis applied to the diagnosis and tracking of Alzheimer's disease
- Author
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Freeborough, Peter A. and Fox, Nick C.
- Subjects
Alzheimer's disease -- Diagnosis ,Magnetic resonance imaging -- Analysis ,Imaging systems -- Image quality ,Business ,Electronics ,Electronics and electrical industries ,Health care industry - Abstract
We assess the value of magnetic resonance (MR) image texture in Alzheimer's disease (AD) both as a diagnostic marker and as a measure of progression. [T.sub.1]-weighted MR scans were acquired from 40 normal controls and 24 AD patients. These were split into a training set (20 controls, 10 AD) and a test set (20 controls, 14 AD). In addition, five control subjects and five AD patients were scanned repeatedly over several years. On each scan a texture feature vector was evaluated over the brain; this consisted of 260 measures derived from the spatial gray-level dependence method. A stepwise discriminant analysis was applied to the training set, to obtain a linear discriminant function. In the test set, this function yielded significantly different values for the control and AD groups (p < [10.sup.-1]) with only small group overlap; a classification rate of 91% was obtained. For the repeatedly scanned control subjects, the median increment in the discriminant function between successive scans of 0.12 was not significantly different from zero (p > 0.05); for the repeatedly scanned AD patients the corresponding median increment of 1.4 was significantly different from zero (p < 0.05). MR image texture may be a useful aid in the diagnosis and tracking of Alzheimer's disease. Index Terms - Alzheimer's disease, classification, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), texture.
- Published
- 1998