Graph of Hippocampal Subfields Grading for Alzheimer’s Disease Prediction

Numerous methods have been proposed to capture early hippocampus alterations caused by Alzheimer’s disease. Among them, patch-based grading approach showed its capability to capture subtle structural alterations. This framework applied on hippocampus obtains state-of-the-art results for AD detection but is limited for its prediction compared to the same approaches based on whole-brain analysis. We assume that this limitation could come from the fact that hippocampus is a complex structure divided into different subfields. Indeed, it has been shown that AD does not equally impact hippocampal subfields. In this work, we propose a graph-based representation of the hippocampal subfields alterations based on patch-based grading feature. The strength of this approach comes from better modeling of the inter-related alterations through the different hippocampal subfields. Thus, we show that our novel method obtains similar results than state-of-the-art approaches based on whole-brain analysis with improving by 4 percent points of accuracy patch-based grading methods based on hippocampus.