Multiple Kernel Learning Based Classification of Parkinson’s Disease With Multi-Modal Transcranial Sonography

Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is the most common motor neurodegenerative disease in elderly population. Transcranial sonography (TCS) has become a popular imaging tool for diagnosis of PD in clinical practice. Moreover, several pioneering work have developed the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) for PD with the transcranial B-mode sonography (TBS). It is worth noting that TCS not only has the TBS modality, but also can image the blood flow of major cerebral arteries, which is named transcranial Doppler sonography (TDS). TDS also has been applied to evaluate PD patients with orthostatic hypotension. However, the TDS-based CAD for PD has not been investigated. Since TBS and TDS provide the complementary structural and functional information about brain, it is feasible to develop a multi-modal TCS-based CAD for PD by combining both TBS and TDS. Therefore, in this work, we propose a multiple kernel learning (MKL) based CAD for PD with multi-modal TCS imaging. Particularly, the statistical and texture features are extracted from the midbrain region from TBS images, and the features about blood flow are calculated from the spectrum curves in TDS. The multi-modal features are then fed to a MKL classifier for classification of PD. The experimental results show that the multi-modal TCS-based method outperforms both the single-modal TBS- and TDS-based algorithm, which suggests the feasibility and effectiveness of combining TBS and TDS for diagnosis of PD.