Boosting Alzheimer Disease Diagnosis Using PET Images

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is one of the most frequent type of dementia. Currently there is no cure for AD and early diagnosis is crucial to the development of treatments that can delay the disease progression. Brain imaging can be a biomarker for Alzheimer´s disease. This has been shown in several works with MR Images, but in the case of functional imaging such as PET, further investigation is still needed to determine their ability to diagnose AD, especially at the early stage of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). In this paper we study the use of PET images of the ADNI database for the diagnosis of AD and MCI. We adopt a Boosting classification method, a technique based on a mixture of simple classifiers, which performs feature selection concurrently with the segmentation thus is well suited to high dimensional problems. The Boosting classifier achieved an accuracy of 90.97% in the detection of AD and 79.63% in the detection of MCI.