Identification of Alzheimer's Disease and Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Networks Constructed Based on Multiple Morphological Brain Features

Structural brain markers are important for characterizing the pathology of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here, we constructed a multifeature-based network (MFN) for each individual using a sparse linear regression performed on six types of morphological features to promote the structure-based autodiagnosis. The categorization performance of the MFN was evaluated in 165 normal control subjects, 221 patients with MCI, and 142 patients with AD. We achieved 96.42% and 96.37% accuracy, respectively, in distinguishing the patients with AD and MCI from the normal control subjects, and reasonable discrimination of the two disease cohorts (70.52%) and prediction of the MCI to AD progression (65.61%). The performance was further improved by combining the properties of the MFN with the morphological features. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the MFN in combination with morphological features obtained from single imaging modality, serving as robust biomarkers in the diagnosis of AD and MCI.