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Fully automatic diagnostic system for early- and late-onset mild Alzheimer’s disease using FDG PET and 3D-SSP

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European Journal of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to design a fully automatic computer-assisted diagnostic system for early- and late-onset mild Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

Methods

Glucose metabolic images were obtained from mild AD patients and normal controls using positron emission tomography (PET) and 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG). Two groups of 20 mild AD patients with different ages of onset were examined. A fully automatic diagnostic system using the statistical brain mapping method was established from the early-onset (EO) and late-onset (LO) groups, with mean ages of 59.1 and 70.9 years and mean MMSE scores of 23.3 and 22.8, respectively. Aged-matched normal subjects were used as controls. We compared the diagnostic performance of visual inspection of conventional axial FDG PET images by experts and beginners with that of our fully automatic diagnostic system in another 15 EO and 15 LO AD patients (mean age 58.4 and 71.7, mean MMSE 23.6 and 23.1, respectively) and 30 age-matched normal controls. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was performed to compare data.

Results

The diagnostic performance of the automatic diagnostic system was comparable with that of visual inspection by experts. The area under the ROC curve for the automatic diagnostic system was 0.967 for EO AD patients and 0.878 for LO AD patients. The mean area under the ROC curve for visual inspection by experts was 0.863 and 0.881 for the EO and LO AD patients, respectively. The mean area under the ROC curve for visual inspection by beginners was 0.828 and 0.717, respectively.

Conclusion

The fully automatic diagnostic system for EO and LO AD was able to perform at a similar diagnostic level to visual inspection of conventional axial images by experts.

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Acknowledgement

The authors thank Mr. Shuya Miki (Nihon Medi-Physics, Nishinomiya, Hyogo, Japan) for providing and improving the iSSP program which uses the 3D-SSP program and was dedicated to this automatic method.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine, Hyogo Brain and Heart Center, 520 Saisho-Ko,, Himeji, Hyogo, 670-0981, Japan

    Kazunari Ishii, Atsushi K. Kono, Hiroki Sasaki, Naokazu Miyamoto & Tetsuya Fukuda

  2. Department of Image-Based Medicine, Institute of Biomedical Research and Innovation,, Kobe, Japan

    Setsu Sakamoto

  3. Behavioral Neurology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine,, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan

    Etsuro Mori

Authors
  1. Kazunari Ishii
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  2. Atsushi K. Kono
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  3. Hiroki Sasaki
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  4. Naokazu Miyamoto
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  5. Tetsuya Fukuda
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  6. Setsu Sakamoto
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  7. Etsuro Mori
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kazunari Ishii.

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Ishii, K., Kono, A.K., Sasaki, H. et al. Fully automatic diagnostic system for early- and late-onset mild Alzheimer’s disease using FDG PET and 3D-SSP. Eur J Nucl Med Mol Imaging 33, 575–583 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-005-0015-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00259-005-0015-0

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