title: Identification of Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Multi-Modal Brain Features: A Combined Structural MRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study.
abstract: Identifying amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is of great clinical importance because aMCI is a putative prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease. The present study aimed to explore the feasibility of accurately identifying aMCI with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarker. We integrated measures of both gray matter (GM) abnormalities derived from structural MRI and white matter (WM) alterations acquired from diffusion tensor imaging at the voxel level across the entire brain. In particular, multi-modal brain features, including GM volume, WM fractional anisotropy, and mean diffusivity, were extracted from a relatively large sample of 64 Han Chinese aMCI patients and 64 matched controls. Then, support vector machine classifiers for GM volume, FA, and MD were fused to distinguish the aMCI patients from the controls. The fused classifier was evaluated with the leave-one-out and the 10-fold cross-validations, and the classifier had an accuracy of 83.59% and an area under the curve of 0.862. The most discriminative regions of GM were mainly located in the medial temporal lobe, temporal lobe, precuneus, cingulate gyrus, parietal lobe, and frontal lobe, whereas the most discriminative regions of WM were mainly located in the corpus callosum, cingulum, corona radiata, frontal lobe, and parietal lobe. Our findings suggest that aMCI is characterized by a distributed pattern of GM abnormalities and WM alterations that represent discriminative power and reflect relevant pathological changes in the brain, and these changes further highlight the advantage of multi-modal feature integration for identifying aMCI.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yunyan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xie
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/Mc Govern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Zaixu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Hongqi Hospital, Mudanjiang Medical College, Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang, China.
authors.forename: Zhongmin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Can
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sheng
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Kuncheng
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/Mc Govern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Gaolang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.|Center of Alzheimer's Disease, Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders, China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Xuan Wu Hospital of the Capital Medical University, Beijing, China.|Center of Alzheimer's Disease, Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders, China.|Beijing Key Laboratory of Geriatric Cognitive Disorders and Neurodegenerative Laboratory of Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Jianping
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jia
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D016880:Anisotropy; D019540:Area Under Curve; D044466:Asian People; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D002681:China; D060825:Cognitive Dysfunction / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D056324:Diffusion Tensor Imaging / Q000379:methods; D005260:Female; D066128:Gray Matter / Q000473:pathology; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D008875:Middle Aged; D009929:Organ Size; D012372:ROC Curve; D060388:Support Vector Machine; D066127:White Matter / Q000473:pathology
keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; amnestic mild cognitive impairment; classification; diffusion tensor imaging; structural magnetic resonance imaging; support vector machine