BundleMAP: Anatomically localized features from dMRI for detection of disease

Abstract

We present BundleMAP, a novel method for extracting features from diffusion MRI (dMRI), which can be used to detect disease with supervised classification. BundleMAP uses manifold learning to aggregate measurements over localized segments of nerve fiber bundles, which are natural anatomical units in this data. We obtain a fully integrated machine learning pipeline by combining this idea with mechanisms for outlier removal and feature selection. We demonstrate that it increases accuracy on a clinical dataset for which classification results have been reported previously, and that it pinpoints the anatomical locations relevant to the classification.