View-centralized multi-atlas classification for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis

Multi-atlas based methods have been recently used for classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, that is, mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Compared with traditional single-atlas based methods, multiatlas based methods adopt multiple predefined atlases and thus are less biased by a certain atlas. However, most existing multiatlas based methods simply average or concatenate the features from multiple atlases, which may ignore the potentially important diagnosis information related to the anatomical differences among different atlases. In this paper, we propose a novel view (i.e., atlas) centralized multi-atlas classification method, which can better exploit useful information in multiple feature representations from different atlases. Specifically, all brain images are registered onto multiple atlases individually, to extract feature representations in each atlas space. Then, the proposed view-centralized multi-atlas feature selection method is used to select the most discriminative features from each atlas with extra guidance from other atlases. Next, we design a support vector machine (SVM) classifier using the selected features in each atlas space. Finally, we combine multiple SVM classifiers for multiple atlases through a classifier ensemble strategy for making a final decision. We have evaluated our method on 459 subjects [including 97 AD, 117 progressive MCI (p-MCI), 117 stable MCI (s-MCI), and 128 normal controls (NC)] from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database, and achieved an accuracy of 92.51% for AD versus NC classification and an accuracy of 78.88% for p-MCI versus s-MCI classification. These results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the previous multi-atlas based classification methods.