AutoEncoder-based Feature Ranking for Predicting Mild Cognitive Impairment Conversion using FDG-PET Images

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a most common type of neurodegenerative brain disease in elderly people. Early diagnosis of AD is crucial for providing suitable care. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) images and machine learning can be used to support this purpose. In this paper, we present a method for ranking the effectiveness of brain regions of interest (ROI) to distinguish between stable mild cognitive impairment (sMCI) from progressive mild cognitive impairment (pMCI) in brain PET images based on AutoEncoder (AE). Experiments on the ADNI dataset show that our proposed method significantly improves classifier performance when compared to other popular feature ranking methods such as Fisher score, T-score, and Lasso. Our results suggest that instead of focusing on designing a complex AE structure, we can also use simple-but-multiple AEs for feature ranking. The proposed method could be easily applied to any image dataset where a feature selection is needed.