Computer-aided diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using support vector machines and classification trees

Abstract

This paper presents a computer-aided diagnosis technique for improving the accuracy of early diagnosis of Alzheimer-type dementia. The proposed methodology is based on the selection of voxels which present Welch's t-test between both classes, normal and Alzheimer images, greater than a given threshold. The mean and standard deviation of intensity values are calculated for selected voxels. They are chosen as feature vectors for two different classifiers: support vector machines with linear kernel and classification trees. The proposed methodology reaches greater than 95% accuracy in the classification task.