Computer-assisted diagnosis of Alzheimer´s disease

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative dementia. It is very difficult to distinguish between healthy and reached subject. But achieving the hippocampus appears before the first clinical signs of the disease, in the mild cognitive impairement (MCI) phase. The hippocampus is a key area to facilitate early diagnosis. An automatic computer-aided diagnosis used to provide a second opinion to the radiologist. Such a system typically begins with a pretreatment to obtain a more readable and less noisy image. In this paper we propose a method, which is based on the description of hippocampus volume to facilate diagnose Alzheimer´s disease. We use the average filter as a pretreatment to remove noise, the active shape model (ASM) to locate the area of the hippocampus and an effective performance method of classification.