- Academic Editor
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Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a brain disorder characterized
by atrophy of cerebral cortex and neurofibrillary tangles. Accurate
identification of individuals at high risk of developing AD is key to early
intervention. Combining neuroimaging markers derived from diffusion tensor images
with machine learning techniques, unique anatomical patterns can be identified
and further distinguished between AD and healthy control (HC). Methods:
In this study, 37 AD patients (ADs) and 36 healthy controls (HCs) from the
Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative were applied to tract-based spatial
statistics (TBSS) analysis and multi-metric classification research.
Results: The TBSS results showed that the corona radiata, corpus
callosum and superior longitudinal fasciculus were the white matter fiber tracts
which mainly suffered the severe damage in ADs. Using support vector machine
recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) method, the classification performance
received a decent improvement. In addition, the integration of fractional
anisotropy (FA) + mean diffusivity (MD) + radial diffusivity (RD) into
multi-metric could effectively separate ADs from HCs. The rank of significance of
diffusion metrics was FA