Brain Tortuosity as Biomarker to Classify Mild Cognitive Impairment and Control Subjects

Eduardo Barbará Morales, Karla C.Rojas Saavedra, Luis Jiménez Ángeles, Verónica Medina Bañuelos

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is an abnormal deterioration of cognitive functions, whose prevalence is considerable in adults older than 65 years old. Several of these cases will convert to Alzheimer’s disease and therefore, MCI’s simple, proper and opportune diagnosis continues to be a research field with great impact in public health. In this paper we propose tortuosity, which is defined as a shape measure that has been applied to quantify morphological changes in several anatomical structures, as a potential biomarker sensitive enough to depict early brain changes that appear in MCI subjects in comparison with healthy controls (HC). Also, a random forest (RF) classification strategy was implemented to discriminate between MCI and HC populations. A training population selected from the ADNI database and a test group of 21 mexican subjects were analyzed. Statistical analysis showed significant differences (p < 0.05) in tortuosity indices determined for MCI vs HC populations in most of the measured cortical structures. Classification rates increased by 6.7% during training and 4.77% during the test stage, when incorporating tortuosity to other image-based features set. This suggests that tortuosity is a promising morphological parameter to be considered for early stages of Alzheimer disease (AD) and that, combined with an RF classifier, it can adequately separate HC and MCI subjects.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication8th Latin American Conference on Biomedical Engineering and 42nd National Conference on Biomedical Engineering - Proceedings of CLAIB-CNIB 2019
EditorsCésar A. González Díaz, Christian Chapa González, Eric Laciar Leber, Hugo A. Vélez, Norma P. Puente, Dora-Luz Flores, Adriano O. Andrade, Héctor A. Galván, Fabiola Martínez, Renato García, Citlalli J. Trujillo, Aldo R. Mejía
PublisherSpringer
Pages327-333
Number of pages7
ISBN (Print)9783030306472
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event8th Latin American Conference on Biomedical Engineering and the 42nd National Conference on Biomedical Engineering, CLAIB-CNIB 2019 - Cancún, Mexico
Duration: 2 Oct 20195 Oct 2019

Publication series

NameIFMBE Proceedings
Volume75
ISSN (Print)1680-0737
ISSN (Electronic)1433-9277

Conference

Conference8th Latin American Conference on Biomedical Engineering and the 42nd National Conference on Biomedical Engineering, CLAIB-CNIB 2019
Country/TerritoryMexico
CityCancún
Period2/10/195/10/19

Keywords

  • Mild Cognitive Impairment
  • Random forest
  • Tortuosity biomarker

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