Title:A Spherical Brain Mapping of MR Images for the Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease
VOLUME: 13 ISSUE: 5
Author(s):F. J. Martinez-Murcia, J. M. Górriz, J. Ramírez, A. Ortiz and for the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Affiliation:Department of Signal Theory, Networking and Communications, 18071 University of Granada, Spain.
Keywords:Alzheimer's Disease, Brain Structure, Feature Reduction, MRI, Visualization.
Abstract:Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is of fundamental importance in neuroscience,
providing good contrast and resolution, as well as not being considered invasive. Despite the development
of newer techniques involving radiopharmaceuticals, it is still a recommended tool in Alzheimer’s
Disease (AD) neurological practice to assess neurodegeneration, and recent research suggests
that it could reveal changes in the brain even before the symptomatology appears. In this paper we
propose a method that performs a Spherical Brain Mapping, using different measures to project the
three-dimensional MR brain images onto two-dimensional maps revealing statistical characteristics of
the tissue. The resulting maps could be assessed visually, but also perform a significant feature reduction that will allow
further supervised or unsupervised processing, reducing the computational load while maintaining a large amount of the
original information. We have tested our methodology against a MRI database comprising 180 AD affected patients and
180 normal controls, where some of the mappings have revealed as an optimum strategy for the automatic processing and
characterization of AD patterns, achieving up to a 90.9% of accuracy, as well as significantly reducing the computational
load. Additionally, our maps allow the visual analysis and interpretation of the images, which can be of great help in the
diagnosis of this and other types of dementia.
