Thesis
English
ID: <
10670/1.kc742g>
Abstract
Content-Based Visual Information Retrieval and Classification on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is penetrating the universe of IT tools supporting clinical decision making. A clinician can take profit from retrieving subject’s scans with similar patterns. In this thesis, we use the visual indexing framework and pattern recognition analysis based on structural MRIand Tensor Diffusion Imaging (DTI) data to discriminate three categories of subjects: Normal Controls (NC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD). The approach extracts visual features from the most involved areas in the disease: Hippocampusand Posterior Cingulate Cortex. Hence, we represent signal variations (atrophy) inside the Region of Interest anatomy by a set of local features and we build a disease-related signature using an atlas based parcellation of the brain scan. The extracted features are quantized using the Bag-of-Visual-Words approach to build one signature by brain/ROI(subject). This yields a transformation of a full MRI brain into a compact disease-related signature. Several schemes of information fusion are applied to enhance the diagnosis performance. The proposed approach is less time-consuming compared to the state of thearts methods, computer-based and does not require the intervention of an expert during the classification/retrieval phase.