A novel feature selection in the case of brain PET image classification

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging is of importance for diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer Disease (AD). Computer aided diagnosis methods could process and analyze quantitatively these images, in order to better characterize and extract meaningful information for medical diagnosis. This paper presents a novel computer-aided diagnosis technique for brain PET images classification in the case of AD. Brain images are first segmented into Regions Of Interest (ROI) using an atlas. Computing some statistical parameters on these regions, we define a Separation Power Factor (SPF) associated to each region. This factor quantifies the ability of each region to separate AD from Healthy Control (HC) brain images. Ranking selected regions according to their SPF and inputting them to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, yields better classification accuracy rate than when inputting the same number of ranked regions extracted from four others classical feature selection methods.