Parkinson’s Disease Classification Using Gray Matter MRI and Deep Learning: A Comparative Framework

In this study, we propose multiple deep learning models for classifying gray matter MRI images of healthy individuals, prodromal Parkinson’s disease (PD) subjects, and diagnosed PD patients. The two proposed models extend conventional deep learning architectures—MedicalNet3D and 3D ResNet18—by performing feature extraction separately for each class and inputting these features into distinct multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers constructed via fine-tuning. To mitigate overfitting problem and improve generalizability, we introduce a training method based on group-wise feature fusion, in which subject IDs are separated to avoid data leakage during training. Through comparative experiments using the PPMI database, the effectiveness of the proposed approach was validated.