A Fully Automatic Framework for Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis by Multi-Modality Images

BACKGROUND: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a prevalent long-term neurodegenerative disease. Though the criteria of PD diagnosis are relatively well defined, current diagnostic procedures using medical images are labor-intensive and expertise-demanding. Hence, highly integrated automatic diagnostic algorithms are desirable. METHODS: In this work, we propose an end-to-end multi-modality diagnostic framework, including segmentation, registration, feature extraction and machine learning, to analyze the features of striatum for PD diagnosis. Multi-modality images, including T1-weighted MRI and (11)C-CFT PET, are integrated into the proposed framework. The reliability of this method is validated on a dataset with the paired images from 49 PD subjects and 18 Normal (NL) subjects. RESULTS: We obtained a promising diagnostic accuracy in the PD/NL classification task. Meanwhile, several comparative experiments were conducted to validate the performance of the proposed framework. CONCLUSION: We demonstrated that (1) the automatic segmentation provides accurate results for the diagnostic framework, (2) the method combining multi-modality images generates a better prediction accuracy than the method with single-modality PET images, and (3) the volume of the striatum is proved to be irrelevant to PD diagnosis.