Predictive markers for Parkinson's disease using deep neural nets on neuromelanin sensitive MRI

Neuromelanin sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (NMS-MRI) has been crucial in identifying abnormalities in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) in Parkinson's disease (PD) as PD is characterized by loss of dopaminergic neurons in the SNc. Current techniques employ estimation of contrast ratios of the SNc, visualized on NMS-MRI, to discern PD patients from the healthy controls. However, the extraction of these features is time-consuming and laborious and moreover provides lower prediction accuracies. Furthermore, these do not account for patterns of subtle changes in PD in the SNc. To mitigate this, our work establishes a computer-based analysis technique that uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to create prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers of PD from NMS-MRI. Our technique not only performs with a superior testing accuracy (80%) as compared to contrast ratio-based classification (56.5% testing accuracy) and radiomics classifier (60.3% testing accuracy), but also supports discriminating PD from atypical parkinsonian syndromes (85.7% test accuracy). Moreover, it has the capability to locate the most discriminative regions on the neuromelanin contrast images. These discriminative activations demonstrate that the left SNc plays a key role in the classification in comparison to the right SNc, and are in agreement with the concept of asymmetry in PD. Overall, the proposed technique has the potential to support radiological diagnosis of PD while facilitating deeper understanding into the abnormalities in SNc.