Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), one of the main causes of death in elderly people, is characterized by Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) at prodromal stage. Nevertheless, only part of MCI subjects could progress to AD. The main objective of this paper is thus to identify those who will develop a dementia of AD type among MCI patients. 18F-FluoroDeoxyGlucose Positron Emission Tomography (18F-FDG PET) serves as a neuroimaging modality for early diagnosis as it can reflect neural activity via measuring glucose uptake at resting-state. In this paper, we design a deep network on 18F-FDG PET modality to address the problem of AD identification at early MCI stage. To this end, a Multi-view Separable Pyramid Network (MiSePyNet) is proposed, in which representations are learned from axial, coronal and sagittal views of PET scans so as to offer complementary information and then combined to make a decision jointly. Different from the widely and naturally used 3D convolution operations for 3D images, the proposed architecture is deployed with separable convolution from slice-wise to spatial-wise successively, which can retain the spatial information and reduce training parameters compared to 2D and 3D networks, respectively. Experiments on ADNI dataset show that the proposed method can yield better performance than both traditional and deep learning-based algorithms for predicting the progression of Mild Cognitive Impairment, with a classification accuracy of 83.05%.

Using a single imaging modality to diagnose Alzheimer's Disease (AD) or Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a challenging task. FluoroDeoxyGlucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) is an important and effective modality usedforthatpurpose.Inthispaper,wedevelopanovelmethodby using single modality (FDG-PET) but multi-level feature, which considers both region properties and connectivities between regions to classify AD or MCI from Normal Control (NC). First, three levels of features are extracted: statistical, connectivity and graph-based features. Then the connectivity features are decomposed into 3 different sets of features according to a proposed similarity-driven ranking method, which can not only reduce the feature dimension but also increase the classifier's diversity. Last, after feeding the 3 levels of features to different classifiers, a new classifier selection strategy, maximum Mean squared Error (mMsE), is developed to select a pair of classifiers with high diversity. In order to do the majority voting, a decision-making scheme, a nested cross validation technique is applied to choose another classifier according to the accuracy. Experiments on Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database show that the proposed method outperforms most FDG-PET-based classification algorithms, especially for classifying progressive MCI (pMCI) from stable MCI (sMCI).

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a molecular medical imaging modality which is commonly used for neurodegenerative diseases diagnosis. Computer-aided diagnosis, based on medical image analysis, could help quantitative evaluation of brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). A novel method of ranking the effectiveness of brain volume of interest (VOI) to separate healthy control from AD brains PET images is presented in this paper. Brain images are first mapped into anatomical VOIs using an atlas. Histogram-based features are then extracted and used to select and rank VOIs according to the area under curve (AUC) parameter, which produces a hierarchy of the ability of VOIs to separate between groups of subjects. The top-ranked VOIs are then input into a support vector machine classifier. The developed method is evaluated on a local database image and compared to the known selection feature methods. Results show that using AUC outperforms classification results in the case of a two group separation.

A Bayesian method with spatial constraint is proposed for vessel segmentation in retinal images. The proposed model makes the assumption that the posterior probability of each pixel is dependent on posterior probabilities of their neighboring pixels. An energy function is defined for the proposed model. By applying the modified level set approach to minimize the proposed energy function, we can identify blood vessels in the retinal image. Evaluation of the developed method is done on real retinal images which are from the DRIVE database and the STARE database. The performance is analyzed and compared to other published methods using a number of measures which include accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. The proposed approach is proved to be effective on these two databases. The average accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity on the DRIVE database are 0.9529, 0.7513, and 0.9792, respectively, and for the STARE database 0.9476, 0.7147, and 0.9735, respectively. The performance is better than that of other vessel segmentation methods.

Over the past decades, the analysis metabolic connectivity patterns has received significant attention in exploring the underlying mechanism of human behaviors, and the neural underpinnings of brain neurological disorders. Brain network can be considered a powerful tool and play an important role in the analysis and understanding of brain metabolic patterns. With the advantages and emergence of metabolic-based network analysis, this study aims to systematically review how brain properties, under various conditions, can be studied using Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) images and graph theory, as well as applications of this approach. Additionally, this study provides a brief summary of graph metrics and their uses in studying and diagnosing different types of brain disorders using FDG-PET images. In this study, we used several databases in Web of Science including Web of Science Core Collection, MEDLINE to search for related studies from 1980 up to the present, focusing on FDG-PET images and graph theory. From 68 articles that matched our keywords, we selected 28 for a full review in order to find out the most recent findings and trends. Our results reveal that graph theory and its applications in analyzing metabolic connectivity patterns have attracted the attention of researchers since 2015. While most of the studies are focusing on group-level based analysis, there is a growing trend in individual-based network analysis. Although metabolic connectivity can be applied to both neurological and psychiatric disorders, the majority of studies concentrate on neurological disorders, particularly Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease. Most of the findings focus on changes in brain network topology, including brain segregation and integration. This review provides an insight into how graph theory can be used to study metabolic connectivity patterns under various conditions including neurological and psychiatric disorders.