Classification of Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment, and cognitively unimpaired individuals using multi-feature kernel discriminant dictionary learning

Accurate classification of either patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the prodromal stage of AD, from cognitively unimpaired (CU) individuals is important for clinical diagnosis and adequate intervention. The current study focused on distinguishing AD or MCI from CU based on the multi-feature kernel supervised within-Class-similar discriminative dictionary learning algorithm (MKSCDDL), which we introduced in a previous study, demonstrating that MKSCDDL had superior performance in face recognition. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET), and florbetapir-PET data fromthe Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) databasewere all included for classification of AD vs. CU, MCI vs. CU, as well as AD vs. MCI (113 AD patients, 110 MCI patients, and 117 CU subjects). By adopting MKSCDDL, we achieved a classification accuracy of 98.18% for AD vs. CU, 78.50% for MCI vs. CU, and 74.47% for AD vs. MCI, which in each instance was superior to results obtained using several other state-of-the-art approaches (MKL, JRC, mSRC, and mSCDDL). In addition, testing time results outperformed other high quality methods. Therefore, the results suggested that the MKSCDDL procedure is a promising tool for assisting early diagnosis of diseases using neuroimaging data.