Classification of ¹⁸F-Florbetaben Amyloid Brain PET Image using PCA-SVM

Amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) allows early and accurate diagnosis in suspected cases of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and contributes to future treatment plans. In the present study, a method of implementing a diagnostic system to distinguish ${\beta}$-Amyloid ($A{\beta}$) positive from $A{\beta}$ negative with objectiveness and accuracy was proposed using a machine learning approach, such as the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). $^{18}F$-Florbetaben (FBB) brain PET images were arranged in control and patients (total n = 176) with mild cognitive impairment and AD. An SVM was used to classify the slices of registered PET image using PET template, and a system was created to diagnose patients comprehensively from the output of the trained model. To compare the per-slice classification, the PCA-SVM model observing the whole brain (WB) region showed the highest performance (accuracy 92.38, specificity 92.87, sensitivity 92.87), followed by SVM with gray matter masking (GMM) (accuracy 92.22, specificity 92.13, sensitivity 92.28) for $A{\beta}$ positivity. To compare according to per-subject classification, the PCA-SVM with WB also showed the highest performance (accuracy 89.21, specificity 71.67, sensitivity 98.28), followed by PCA-SVM with GMM (accuracy 85.80, specificity 61.67, sensitivity 98.28) for $A{\beta}$ positivity. When comparing the area under curve (AUC), PCA-SVM with WB was the highest for per-slice classifiers (0.992), and the models except for SVM with WM were highest for the per-subject classifier (1.000). We can classify $^{18}F$-Florbetaben amyloid brain PET image for $A{\beta}$ positivity using PCA-SVM model, with no additional effects on GMM.