Detection of Alzheimer's Disease with Shape Analysis of MRI Images.

In the current study, we tested the effectiveness of a method using brain shape information for classification of healthy subjects and Alzheimer's disease patients. A P-type Fourier descriptor was used as shape information, and the lateral ventricle excluding the septum lucidum was analyzed. Using a combination of several descriptors as features, we performed classification using a support vector machine. The results revealed classification accuracy of 87.5%, which was superior to the accuracy achieved using volume ratio to intracranial volume (81.5%), which is widely used for conventional evaluation of morphological changes. The current findings suggest that shape information may be more useful in diagnosis, compared with conventional volume ratio.