Patch-Based DTI Grading: Application to Alzheimer's Disease Classification

Early diagnosis is one of the most important challenges related to Alzheimer's disease (AD). To address this issue, numerous studies proposed biomarkers based on anatomical MRI. Among them, patch-based grading demonstrated state-of-the-art results when applied to T1-weighted MRI. In this work, we propose to use a similar framework on different diffusion parameters extracted from DTI. We also propose to use a fast patch-based search strategy to provide novel biomarkers for the early detection of AD. We intensively compare our new grading-based DTI features with basic MRI/DTI biomarkers and evaluate our method within a cross validation classification framework. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed biomarkers obtain competitive results for the identification of the different stages of AD.