Early diagnosis model of Alzheimer's Disease based on sparse logistic regression

Accurate classification of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its prodromal stage, i.e., mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are critical for the effective treatment of AD. However, compared with AD classification tasks, predicting the conversion of MCI to AD is relatively difficult. as there are only minor differences among MCI groups. What's more, in brain imaging analysis, the high dimensionality and relatively small number of subjects brings challenges to computer-aided diagnosis of AD and MCI. Many previous researches focused on the identification of imaging biomarkers for AD diagnosis. In this paper, we introduce sparse logistic regression for the early diagnosis of AD. Sparse logistic regression (SLR) uses L(1/2)regularization to impose a sparsity constraint on logistic regression. The L(1/2)regularization is considered a representative of Lq regularization, where fewer but informative key brain regions are applied for the classification of AD/MCI. We evaluated the SLR on 197 subjects from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. Experimental results showed that the SLR improves the classification performance of AD/MCI compared other classical methods.