A Novel Approach for Diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease Using SVM

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the most intensifying brain disorder that gradually damage memory and thinking skills and later the ability to carry out the normal tasks. It is the most common cause of dementia in older adults. While dementia is more common as people grow older, it is not a normal part of aging. One of the first signs of Alzheimer's disease is memory loss. AD accounts for up to 80% of cases of dementia. The 3 stages of AD is mild, moderate and severe AD. In mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the loss of cognitive skills only slightly affects a person's daily life, moderate stage is the middle stage of AD. While in severe AD, a person is no longer able to function independently and becomes totally reliant on others for care. In this paper, Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease of brain MRI and for classifying it into specific stages. The algorithm was trained and tested using the MRI data from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). The data used include the MRI scanning of about 70 AD patients and 30 normal controls.