Alzheimer´s diagnosis using eigenbrains and support vector machines

An accurate and early diagnosis of the Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is of fundamental importance for the patient´s medical treatment. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images are commonly used by physicians to assist the diagnosis. Presented is a computer-assisted diagnosis tool based in a principal component analysis (PCA) dimensional reduction of the feature space approach and a support vector machine (SVM) classification method for improving the AD diagnosis accuracy by means of SPECT images. The most relevant image features were selected under a PCA compression, which diagonalises the covariance matrix, and the extracted information was used to train an SVM classifier, which could classify new subjects in an unsupervised manner.