Asymmetry of SPECT perfusion image patterns as a diagnostic feature for alzheimer’s disease

  • Authors:

  • Vassili A. Kovalev;Lennart Thurfjell;Roger Lundqvist;Marco Pagani

  • Affiliations:

  • Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom;Centre for Image Analysis, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;Centre for Image Analysis, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden;Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Rome, Italy

  • Venue:
  • MICCAI'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention - Volume Part II
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a new diagnostic feature for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) which is based on assessment of the degree of inter-hemispheric asymmetry using Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT). The asymmetry measure used represents differences in 3D perfusion image patterns in the cerebral hemispheres. We start from the simplest descriptors of brain perfusion such as the mean intensity within pairs of brain lobes, gradually increasing the resolution up to five-dimensional co-occurrence matrices. Evaluation of the method was performed using SPECT scans of 79 subjects including 42 patients with clinical diagnosis of AD and 37 controls. It was found that combination of intensity and gradient features in co-occurrence matrices captures significant differences in asymmetry values between AD and normal controls (p