Advanced system for automously classify brain MRI in neurodegenerative disease

Abstract

There are several dementias but Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is leading cause of dementia in the world. There are an estimated 35.6 million people in the world with dementia and more than 18 million of them have Alzheimer's disease, which supposes more of the 50% of the total people with dementia. In this paper, intelligent algorithms are designed and implemented in order to manipulate Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) stored in a big data base of patients, with the main purpose of being able for decision-making in classification task. It will be possible to predict whether the patient is healthy, has Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), or already has Alzheimer Disease. We tested our method on data from a large data base (more than 1500 patient were analized), with a sensitivity of and specificity close to 90%which is considerable better the human experts, taking into account that in this paper also MCI is classified. It is noteworthy that with this last study we could offer a tool to assist the early diagnosis of dementia and has the potential to be a useful help for clinicians.