Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Hybrid Meta-ROI of MRI Structural Images

Background: The averaged cortical thickness of meta-ROI is currently being used for the diagnosis and prognosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using structural MRI brain images. The purpose of this work is to present a hybrid meta-ROI for the detection of AD. Methods: The AD detectability of selected cortical and volumetric regions of the brain was examined using signal detection theory. The top performing cortical and volumetric ROIs were taken as input nodes to the artificial neural network (ANN) for AD classification. Results: An AD diagnostic accuracy of 91.9% was achieved by using a hybrid meta-ROI consisting of thicknesses of entorhinal and middle temporal cortices, and the volumes of the hippocampus and inferior lateral ventricles. Pairing inferior lateral ventricle dilation with hippocampal volume reduction improves AD detectability by 5.1%. Conclusions: Hybrid meta-ROI, including the dilation of inferior lateral ventricles, outperformed both cortical thickness- and volumetric-based meta-ROIs in the detection of Alzheimer’s disease.