LAUSR

Background Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a prevalent long-term neurodegenerative disease. Though the criteria of PD diagnosis are relatively well defined, current diagnostic procedures using medical images are labor-intensive and expertise-demanding. Hence, highly integrated automatic diagnostic algorithms are desirable. Methods In this work, we propose an end-to-end multi-modality diagnostic framework, including segmentation, registration, feature extraction and machine learning, to analyze the features of striatum for PD diagnosis. Multi-modality images, including T1-weighted MRI and 11C-CFT PET, are integrated into the proposed framework. The reliability of this method is validated on a dataset with the paired images from 49 PD subjects and 18 Normal (NL) subjects. Results We obtained a promising diagnostic accuracy in the PD/NL classification task. Meanwhile, several comparative experiments were conducted to validate the performance of the proposed framework. Conclusion We demonstrated that (1) the automatic segmentation provides accurate results for the diagnostic framework, (2) the method combining multi-modality images generates a better prediction accuracy than the method with single-modality PET images, and (3) the volume of the striatum is proved to be irrelevant to PD diagnosis.