Results of an Adaboost Approach on Alzheimer’s Disease Detection on MRI

In this paper we explore the use of the Voxel-based Morphometry (VBM) detection clusters to guide the feature extraction processes for the detection of Alzheimer’s disease on brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The voxel location detection clusters given by the VBM were applied to select the voxel values upon which the classification features were computed. We have evaluated feature vectors computed over the data from the original MRI volumes and from the GM segmentation volumes, using the VBM clusters as voxel selection masks. We use the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm to perform classification of patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease vs. control subjects. We have also considered combinations of isolated cluster based classifiers and an Adaboost strategy applied to the SVM built on the feature vectors. The study has been performed on MRI volumes of 98 females, after careful demographic selection from the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) database, which is a large number of subjects compared to current reported studies. Results are moderately encouraging, as we can obtain up to 85% accuracy with the Adaboost strategy in a 10-fold cross-validation.