We propose a deep neural network for supervised learning on neuroanatomical shapes. The network directly operates on raw point clouds without the need for mesh processing or the identification of point correspondences, as spatial transformer networks map the data to a canonical space. Instead of relying on hand-crafted shape descriptors, an optimal representation is learned in the end-to-end training stage of the network. The proposed network consists of multiple branches, so that features for multiple structures are learned simultaneously. We demonstrate the performance of our method on two applications: (i) the prediction of Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment and (ii) the regression of the brain age. Finally, we visualize the important parts of the anatomy for the prediction by adapting the occlusion method to point clouds.
Several shape representations have previously been used for supervised learning tasks. Spherical harmonics for approximating the hippocampal shape have been proposed in @cite_10 . Shape information has been derived from thickness measurements of the hippocampus from a medial representation @cite_13 . Statistical shape models to detect hippocampal shape changes were proposed by @cite_11 . Multi-resolution shape features with non-Euclidean wavelets were employed for the analysis of cortical thickness @cite_15 . The use of medial axis shape representations was used to compare the brain morphology of autistic and normal populations @cite_3 . Recently, shape representation based on spectral signatures have been introduced to perform age regression and disease prediction @cite_4 @cite_0 .
@cite_4 @cite_10 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_11
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The hippocampus is affected at an early stage in the development of Alzheimer's disease (AD). With the use of structural magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, we can investigate the effect of AD on the morphology of the hippocampus. The hippocampal shape variations among a population can be usually described using statistical shape models (SSMs). Conventional SSMs model the modes of variations among the population via principal component analysis (PCA). Although these modes are representative of variations within the training data, they are not necessarily discriminative on labeled data or relevant to the differences between the subpopulations. We use the shape descriptors from SSM as features to classify AD from normal control (NC) cases. In this study, a Hotelling's T2 test is performed to select a subset of landmarks which are used in PCA. The resulting variation modes are used as predictors of AD from NC. The discrimination ability of these predictors is evaluated in terms of their classification performances with bagged support vector machines (SVMs). Restricting the model to landmarks with better separation between AD and NC increases the discrimination power of SSM. The predictors extracted on the subregions also showed stronger correlation with the memory-related measurements such as Logical Memory, Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) and the memory subscores of Alzheimer Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS). We describe a new method to automatically discriminate between patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) or mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and elderly controls, based on multidimensional classification of hippocampal shape features. This approach uses spherical harmonics (SPHARM) coefficients to model the shape of the hippocampi, which are segmented from magnetic resonance images (MRI) using a fully automatic method that we previously developed. SPHARM coefficients are used as features in a classification procedure based on support vector machines (SVM). The most relevant features for classification are selected using a bagging strategy. We evaluate the accuracy of our method in a group of 23 patients with AD (10 males, 13 females, age+ -standard-deviation (SD)=73+ -6 years, mini-mental score (MMS)=24.4+ -2.8), 23 patients with amnestic MCI (10 males, 13 females, age+ -SD=74+ -8 years, MMS=27.3+ -1.4) and 25 elderly healthy controls (13 males, 12 females, age+ -SD=64+ -8 years), using leave-one-out cross-validation. For AD vs controls, we obtain a correct classification rate of 94 , a sensitivity of 96 , and a specificity of 92 . For MCI vs controls, we obtain a classification rate of 83 , a sensitivity of 83 , and a specificity of 84 . This accuracy is superior to that of hippocampal volumetry and is comparable to recently published SVM-based whole-brain classification methods, which relied on a different strategy. This new method may become a useful tool to assist in the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Abstract The hippocampus is involved at the onset of the neuropathological pathways leading to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are at increased risk of AD. Hippocampal volume has been shown to predict which MCI subjects will convert to AD. Our aim in the present study was to produce a fully automated prognostic procedure, scalable to high throughput clinical and research applications, for the prediction of MCI conversion to AD using 3D hippocampal morphology. We used an automated analysis for the extraction and mapping of the hippocampus from structural magnetic resonance scans to extract 3D hippocampal shape morphology, and we then applied machine learning classification to predict conversion from MCI to AD. We investigated the accuracy of prediction in 103 MCI subjects (mean age 74.1 years) from the longitudinal AddNeuroMed study. Our model correctly predicted MCI conversion to dementia within a year at an accuracy of 80 (sensitivity 77 , specificity 80 ), a performance which is competitive with previous predictive models dependent on manual measurements. Categorization of MCI subjects based on hippocampal morphology revealed more rapid cognitive deterioration in MMSE scores ( p p Recent studies suggest that deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models show higher representational similarity, compared to any other existing object recognition models, with macaque inferior temporal (IT) cortical responses, human ventral stream fMRI activations and human object recognition. These studies employed natural images of objects. A long research tradition employed abstract shapes to probe the selectivity of IT neurons. If CNN models provide a realistic model of IT responses, then they should capture the IT selectivity for such shapes. Here, we compare the activations of CNN units to a stimulus set of 2D regular and irregular shapes with the response selectivity of macaque IT neurons and with human similarity judgements. The shape set consisted of regular shapes that differed in nonaccidental properties, and irregular, asymmetrical shapes with curved or straight boundaries. We found that deep CNNs (Alexnet, VGG-16 and VGG-19) that were trained to classify natural images show response modulations to these shapes that were similar to those of IT neurons. Untrained CNNs with the same architecture than trained CNNs, but with random weights, demonstrated a poorer similarity than CNNs trained in classification. The difference between the trained and untrained CNNs emerged at the deep convolutional layers, where the similarity between the shape-related response modulations of IT neurons and the trained CNNs was high. Unlike IT neurons, human similarity judgements of the same shapes correlated best with the last layers of the trained CNNs. In particular, these deepest layers showed an enhanced sensitivity for straight versus curved irregular shapes, similar to that shown in human shape judgments. In conclusion, the representations of abstract shape similarity are highly comparable between macaque IT neurons and deep convolutional layers of CNNs that were trained to classify natural images, while human shape similarity judgments correlate better with the deepest layers.