ExHiF: Alzheimer's disease detection using exemplar histogram-based features with CT and MR images

Ela Kaplan; Mehmet Baygin; Prabal D Barua; Sengul Dogan; Turker Tuncer; Erman Altunisik; Elizabeth Emma Palmer; U Rajendra Acharya

doi:10.1016/j.medengphy.2023.103971

ExHiF: Alzheimer's disease detection using exemplar histogram-based features with CT and MR images

Med Eng Phys. 2023 May:115:103971. doi: 10.1016/j.medengphy.2023.103971. Epub 2023 Mar 21.

Authors

Ela Kaplan¹, Mehmet Baygin², Prabal D Barua³, Sengul Dogan⁴, Turker Tuncer⁵, Erman Altunisik⁶, Elizabeth Emma Palmer⁷, U Rajendra Acharya⁸

Affiliations

¹ Department of Radiology, Adiyaman Training and Research Hospital, Adiyaman, Turkey.
² Department of Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Ardahan University, Ardahan, Turkey.
³ Cogninet Australia, Sydney, NSW, 2010, Australia; School of Business (Information System), University of Southern Queensland, Australia; Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia; Australian International Institute of Higher Education, Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia; School of Science & Technology, University of New England, Australia; School of Biosciences, Taylor's University, Malaysia; School of Computing, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, India; School of Science and Technology, Kumamoto University, Japan; Sydney School of Education and Social work, University of Sydney, Australia.
⁴ Department of Digital Forensics Engineering, College of Technology, Firat University, Elazig, Turkey. Electronic address: sdogan@firat.edu.tr.
⁵ Department of Digital Forensics Engineering, College of Technology, Firat University, Elazig, Turkey.
⁶ Department of Neurology, Adiyaman University Medicine Faculty, Adiyaman, Turkey.
⁷ Department of Medical Genetics, Sydney Children's Hospital, High Street, Randwick, NSW, Australia.
⁸ School of Mathematics, Physics and Computing, University of Southern Queensland, Springfield, Australia.

PMID: 37120169
DOI: 10.1016/j.medengphy.2023.103971

Abstract

Purpose: The classification of medical images is an important priority for clinical research and helps to improve the diagnosis of various disorders. This work aims to classify the neuroradiological features of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) using an automatic hand-modeled method with high accuracy.

Materials and method: This work uses two (private and public) datasets. The private dataset consists of 3807 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer tomography (CT) images belonging to two (normal and AD) classes. The second public (Kaggle AD) dataset contains 6400 MR images. The presented classification model comprises three fundamental phases: feature extraction using an exemplar hybrid feature extractor, neighborhood component analysis-based feature selection, and classification utilizing eight different classifiers. The novelty of this model is feature extraction. Vision transformers inspire this phase, and hence 16 exemplars are generated. Histogram-oriented gradients (HOG), local binary pattern (LBP) and local phase quantization (LPQ) feature extraction functions have been applied to each exemplar/patch and raw brain image. Finally, the created features are merged, and the best features are selected using neighborhood component analysis (NCA). These features are fed to eight classifiers to obtain highest classification performance using our proposed method. The presented image classification model uses exemplar histogram-based features; hence, it is called ExHiF.

Results: We have developed the ExHiF model with a ten-fold cross-validation strategy using two (private and public) datasets with shallow classifiers. We have obtained 100% classification accuracy using cubic support vector machine (CSVM) and fine k nearest neighbor (FkNN) classifiers for both datasets.

Conclusions: Our developed model is ready to be validated with more datasets and has the potential to be employed in mental hospitals to assist neurologists in confirming their manual screening of AD using MRI/CT images.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease detection; ExHiF; HOG; Handcrafted feature; LBP; LPQ.

MeSH terms

Alzheimer Disease* / diagnostic imaging
Alzheimer Disease* / pathology
Brain / diagnostic imaging
Humans
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods
Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods
Tomography, X-Ray Computed