Alzheimer's diagnosis using eigenbrains and support vector machines

An accurate and early diagnosis of the Alzheimer's disease (AD) is of fundamental importance for the patient's medical treatment. Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images are commonly used by physicians to assist the diagnosis. Presented is a computer-assisted diagnosis tool based in a principal component analysis (PCA) dimensional reduction of the feature space approach and a support vector machine (SVM) classification method for improving the AD diagnosis accuracy by means of SPECT images. The most relevant image features were selected under a PCA compression, which diagonalises the covariance matrix, and the extracted information was used to train an SVM classifier, which could classify new subjects in an unsupervised manner.