Identifying Early Mild Cognitive Impairment by Multi-Modality MRI-Based Deep Learning

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a clinical state with a high risk of conversion to Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Since there is no effective treatment for AD, it is extremely important to diagnose MCI as early as possible, as this makes it possible to delay its progression toward AD. However, it's challenging to identify early MCI (EMCI) because there are only mild changes in the brain structures of patients compared with a normal control (NC). To extract remarkable features for these mild changes, in this paper, a multi-modality diagnosis approach based on deep learning is presented. Firstly, we propose to use structure MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) images as the multi-modality data to identify EMCI. Then, a convolutional neural network based on transfer learning technique is developed to extract features of the multi-modality data, where an L1-norm is introduced to reduce the feature dimensionality and retrieve essential features for the identification. At last, the classifier produces 94.2% accuracy for EMCI vs. NC on an ADNI dataset. Experimental results show that multi-modality data can provide more useful information to distinguish EMCI from NC compared with single modality data, and the proposed method can improve classification performance, which is beneficial to early intervention of AD. In addition, it is found that DTI image can act as an important biomarker for EMCI from the point of view of a clinical diagnosis.