MATRIX CLASSIFIER ON DYNAMIC FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY FOR MCI IDENTIFICATION

One of the most popular method for Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis is exploring the Brain functional connectivity (FC) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI). To early prevent AD, it is crucial to distinguish AD and and its preclinical stage, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early MCI (eMCI). In many existing works, dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) which contains rich spatiotemporal information has been exploited for the MCI and eMCI identification. However, most of these dFC based methods only consider the correlation between discrete brain status while ignore the valuable spatiotemporal information contained in dFC. To overcome this limitation, we propose a matrix classifier based method on the dFC signal for MCI and eMCI identification. Specifically, we first represent the dFC correlations by matrix features which contain rich spatiotemporal information and then learn the support matrix machines (SMM) to classify AD and its preclinical stage. Experiments on 600 real people data provide by the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) demonstrate that our proposed matrix classifier based method outperforms other FC and dFC based methods for both normal controls (NC)/MCI identification and NC/eMCI identification.