Diagnosis of brain abnormality using both structural and functional MR images

Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2006:2006:1044-7. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2006.259260.

Abstract

A number of neurological diseases are associated with structural and functional alterations in the brain. This paper presents a method of using both structural and functional MR images for brain disease diagnosis, by machine learning and high-dimensional template warping. First, a high-dimensional template warping technique is used to compute morphological and functional representations for each individual brain in a template space, within a mass preserving framework. Then, statistical regional features are extracted to reduce the dimensionality of morphological and functional representations, as well as to achieve the robustness to registration errors and inter-subject variations. Finally, the most discriminative regional features are selected by a hybrid feature selection method for brain classification, using a nonlinear support vector machine. The proposed method has been applied to classifying the brain images of prenatally cocaine-exposed young adults from those of socioeconomically matched controls, resulting in 91.8% correct classification rate using a leave-one-out cross-validation. Comparison results show the effectiveness of our method and also the importance of simultaneously using both structural and functional images for brain classification.

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Brain / drug effects*
  • Brain / pathology*
  • Brain Diseases / chemically induced*
  • Brain Diseases / pathology*
  • Cocaine / toxicity*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Male
  • Pattern Recognition, Automated
  • Pregnancy
  • Prenatal Exposure Delayed Effects / chemically induced
  • Prenatal Exposure Delayed Effects / pathology*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity

Substances

  • Cocaine