LAUSR

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction is a vital challenge in the area of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as it could determine possible treatment pathways for AD patients. In this work, we presented a robust MCI conversion prediction framework based on the 3D-Zernike Moment (3D-ZM) method that generates statistical features (e.g., shape, texture, and symmetry information) from 3D-MRI scans and improved dynamic particle swarm optimization (IDPSO) that finds an informative sub-set of Zernike features for MCI conversion prediction. We quantified the efficiency of the proposed prediction framework on a large sample of MCI patients including 105 progressive-MCI (pMCI) and 121 stable-MCI (sMCI) at the baseline from the ADNI dataset. Using the proposed MCI conversion prediction framework, pMCI patients were distinguished from sMCI patients with an accuracy exceeding 75% (sensitivity, 83%, and specificity, 68%), which is well comparable with the state-of-the-art MCI conversion prediction approaches. Experimental results indicate that the 3D-ZM method can represent informative statistical patterns from 3D-MRI scans and IDPSO has a great capability to find meaningful statistical features for identifying MCI patients who are at risk of conversion to the AD stage.