Evaluation of Brain Tortuosity Measurement for the Automatic Multimodal Classification of Subjects with Alzheimer's Disease

The 3D tortuosity determined in several brain areas is proposed as a new morphological biomarker (BM) to be considered in early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD). It is measured using the sum of angles method and it has proven to be sensitive to anatomical changes that appear in gray and white matter and temporal and parietal lobes during mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Statistical analysis showed significant differences (p < 0.05) between tortuosity indices determined for healthy controls (HC) vs. MCI and HC vs. AD in most of the analyzed structures. Other clinically used BMs have also been incorporated in the analysis: beta-amyloid and tau protein CSF and plasma concentrations, as well as other image-extracted parameters. A classification strategy using random forest (RF) algorithms was implemented to discriminate between three samples of the studied populations, selected from the ADNI database. Classification rates considering only image-extracted parameters show an increase of 9.17%, when tortuosity is incorporated. An enhancement of 1.67% is obtained when BMs measured from several modalities are combined with tortuosity.