Quantitative susceptibility mapping based hybrid feature extraction for diagnosis of Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the elderly after Alzheimer's disease. The aetiology and pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease (PD) are still unclear, but the loss of dopaminergic cells and the excessive iron deposition in the substantia nigra (SN) are associated with the pathophysiology. As an imaging technique that can quantitatively reflect the amount of iron deposition, Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) has been shown to be a promising modality for the diagnosis of PD. In the present work, we propose a hybrid feature extraction method for PD diagnosis using QSM images. First, we extract radiomics features from the SN using QSM and employ machine learning algorithms to classify PD and normal controls (NC). This approach allows us to investigate which features are most vulnerable to the effects of the disease. Along with this approach, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based method which can extract different features from the QSM image to further support the diagnosis of PD. Finally, we combine these two types of features and we find that the radiomics features and CNN features are complementary to each other, which helps further improve the classification (diagnostic) performance. We conclude that: (1) radiomics features from QSM data have significant clinical value for the diagnosis of PD; (2) CNN features are also useful in the diagnosis of PD; and (3) the combination of radiomics features and CNN features can enhance the diagnostic accuracy.