Image Retrieval for Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Brain Atrophy Pattern

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present image retrieval for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) based on brain atrophy pattern captured by the SPARE-AD (Spatial Pattern of Abnormality for Recognition of Early Alzheimer’s Disease) index. SPARE-AD provides individualized scores of diagnostic and predictive value found to be far beyond standard structural measures. The index was incorporated in the image signature as a representation of the brain atrophy. To evaluate its influence to the retrieval results, Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) provided by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) were used. For this research, baseline images of the patients with diagnosed AD and normal controls (NL) were selected from the dataset, including 416 subjects in total. The obtained experimental results showed that the approach used in this research provides improved retrieval performance, by using semantically precise and powerful, yet low dimensional image descriptor.