Effective Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease by Means of Association Rules

  • R. Chaves
  • J. Ramírez
  • J. M. Górriz
  • M. López
  • D. Salas-Gonzalez
  • I. Illán
  • F. Segovia
  • P. Padilla
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6076)

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel classification method of SPECT images for the early diagnosis of the Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The proposed method is based on Association Rules (ARs) aiming to discover interesting associations between attributes contained in the database. The system uses firstly voxel-as-features (VAF) and Activation Estimation (AE) to find tridimensional activated brain regions of interest (ROIs) for each patient. These ROIs act as inputs to secondly mining ARs between activated blocks for controls, with a specified minimum support and minimum confidence. ARs are mined in supervised mode, using information previously extracted from the most discriminant rules for centering interest in the relevant brain areas, reducing the computational requirement of the system. Finally classification process is performed depending on the number of previously mined rules verified by each subject, yielding an up to 95.87% classification accuracy, thus outperforming recent developed methods for AD diagnosis.

Keywords

SPECT Brain Imaging Alzheimer’s disease Regions of Interest Voxels as features Association Rules Apriori algorithm 

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • R. Chaves
    • 1
  • J. Ramírez
    • 1
  • J. M. Górriz
    • 1
  • M. López
    • 1
  • D. Salas-Gonzalez
    • 1
  • I. Illán
    • 1
  • F. Segovia
    • 1
  • P. Padilla
    • 1
  1. 1.University of GranadaGranadaSpain

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