A Multi-Modal and Multi-Atlas Integrated Framework for Identification of Mild Cognitive Impairment

Background: Multi-modal neuroimaging with appropriate atlas is vital for effectively differentiating mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from healthy controls (HC). Methods: The resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and structural MRI (sMRI) of 69 MCI patients and 61 HC subjects were collected. Then, the gray matter volumes obtained from the sMRI and Hurst exponent (HE) values calculated from rs-fMRI data in the Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL-90), Brainnetome (BN-246), Harvard–Oxford (HOA-112) and AAL3-170 atlases were extracted, respectively. Next, these characteristics were selected with a minimal redundancy maximal relevance algorithm and a sequential feature collection method in single or multi-modalities, and only the optimal features were retained after this procedure. Lastly, the retained characteristics were served as the input features for the support vector machine (SVM)-based method to classify MCI patients, and the performance was estimated with a leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV). Results: Our proposed method obtained the best 92.00% accuracy, 94.92% specificity and 89.39% sensitivity with the sMRI in AAL-90 and the fMRI in HOA-112 atlas, which was much better than using the single-modal or single-atlas features. Conclusion: The results demonstrated that the multi-modal and multi-atlas integrated method could effectively recognize MCI patients, which could be extended into various neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases.