A Preliminary Study of Applying Geometric Deep Learning in Brain Morphometry for Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease

  Objective  A predictive model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was established based on brain surface meshes and geometric deep learning, and its performance was evaluated.

  Methods  Seventy-six clinically diagnosed AD patients and 83 healthy older adults were enrolled and randomly assigned to the training set and the test set according to a 4-to-1 ratio. Brain surface mesh was constructed from 3-D T1-weighted high-resolution structural MR volumes of each participant. After applying a series of simplification to the surface meshes, the training set was fed into the geometric deep neural network for training. The performance of the prediction model was evaluated with the test set, and the evaluation metrics included accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.

  Results  The prediction model trained on the right brain surface meshes with 6000 faces achieved the best performance, with accuracy reaching 93.8%, sensitivity, 91.7%, and specificity, 94.1%. The evolution of the brain surface meshes during convolution and pooling revealed that AD patients had diffuse brain tissue loss compared with healthy older adults.

  Conclusion  Morphological brain analysis based on mesh data and geometric deep learning has great potential in the differential diagnosis of AD.