Novel cortical thickness pattern for accurate detection of Alzheimer's disease

Brain network occupies an important position in representing abnormalities in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Currently, most studies only focused on morphological features of regions of interest without exploring the interregional alterations. In order to investigate the potential discriminative power of a morphological network in AD diagnosis and to provide supportive evidence on the feasibility of an individual structural network study, we propose a novel approach of extracting the correlative features from magnetic resonance imaging, which consists of a two-step approach for constructing an individual thickness network with low computational complexity. Firstly, multi-distance combination is utilized for accurate evaluation of between-region dissimilarity; and then the dissimilarity is transformed to connectivity via calculation of correlation function. An evaluation of the proposed approach has been conducted with 189 normal controls, 198 MCI subjects, and 163 AD patients using machine learning techniques. Results show that the observed correlative feature suggests significant promotion in classification performance compared with cortical thickness, with accuracy of 89.88% and area of 0.9588 under receiver operating characteristic curve.We further improved the performance by integrating both thickness and apolipoprotein E ε4 allele information with correlative features. New achieved accuracies are 92.11% and 79.37% in separating AD from normal controls and AD converters from non-converters, respectively. Differences between using diverse distance measurements and various correlation transformation functions are also discussed to explore an optimal way for network establishment.