title: Prediction of Conversion from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Alzheimer's Disease Using MRI and Structural Network Features.
abstract: Optimized magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features and abnormalities of brain network architectures may allow earlier detection and accurate prediction of the progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we proposed a classification framework to distinguish MCI converters (MCIc) from MCI non-converters (MCInc) by using a combination of FreeSurfer-derived MRI features and nodal features derived from the thickness network. At the feature selection step, we first employed sparse linear regression with stability selection, for the selection of discriminative features in the iterative combinations of MRI and network measures. Subsequently the top K features of available combinations were selected as optimal features for classification. To obtain unbiased results, support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with nested cross validation were used for classification. The combination of 10 features including those from MRI and network measures attained accuracies of 66.04, 76.39, 74.66, and 73.91% for mixed conversion time, 6, 12, and 18 months before diagnosis of probable AD, respectively. Analysis of the diagnostic power of different time periods before diagnosis of probable AD showed that short-term prediction (6 and 12 months) achieved more stable and higher AUC scores compared with long-term prediction (18 months), with K-values from 1 to 30. The present results suggest that meaningful predictors composed of MRI and network measures may offer the possibility for early detection of progression from MCI to AD.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, High-Field Magnetic Resonance Brain Imaging Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Rizhen
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, High-Field Magnetic Resonance Brain Imaging Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of ChinaChengdu, China; School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of ChinaChengdu, China.
authors.forename: Chuhan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: EEG and Cognition Laboratory, University of A Coruña A Coruña, Spain.
authors.forename: Noa
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Fogelson
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, High-Field Magnetic Resonance Brain Imaging Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province, Center for Information in Medicine, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China Chengdu, China.
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
keywords: MRI; early detection; mild cognitive impairment; prediction; structural network