Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common neurodegenerative disease occurring in the elderly population. The effective and accurate classification of AD symptoms by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has a great significance for the clinical diagnosis and prediction of AD patients. Methods: Therefore, this paper proposes a new method for identifying AD patients from healthy subjects by using functional connectivities (FCs) between the activity voxels in the brain based on fMRI data analysis. Firstly, independent component analysis is used to detect the activity voxels in the fMRI signals of AD patients and healthy subjects; Secondly, the FCs between the common activity voxels of the two groups are calculated, and then the FCs with significant differences are further identified by statistical analysis between them; Finally, the classification of AD patients from healthy subjects is realized by using FCs with significant differences as the feature samples in support vector machine. Results: The results show that the proposed identification method can obtain higher classification accuracy, and the FCs between activity voxels within prefrontal lobe as well as those between prefrontal and parietal lobes play an important role in the prediction of AD patients. Furthermore, we also find that more brain regions and much more voxels in some regions are activity in AD group compared with health control group. Conclusion: It has a great potential value for the AD pathogenesis mechanism study.

中文翻译：

---

使用静息态 fMRI 数据中活动体素之间的功能连接识别阿尔茨海默病

背景：阿尔茨海默病（AD）是一种常见于老年人群的神经退行性疾病。利用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）对AD症状进行有效、准确的分类，对AD患者的临床诊断和预测具有重要意义。方法：因此，本文提出了一种基于 fMRI 数据分析的大脑活动体素之间的功能连接（FC），从健康受试者中识别 AD 患者的新方法。首先通过独立成分分析检测AD患者和健康受试者的fMRI信号中的活动体素；其次，计算两组共同活动体素之间的FCs，然后通过统计分析进一步识别差异显着的FCs；最后，通过使用差异显着的FCs作为支持向量机中的特征样本来实现AD患者与健康受试者的分类。结果：结果表明，所提出的识别方法可以获得更高的分类准确率，前额叶内活动体素之间以及前额叶和顶叶之间活动体素之间的FC对AD患者的预测具有重要作用。此外，我们还发现，与健康对照组相比，AD组有更多的大脑区域和更多的体素活动。结论：对AD发病机制的研究具有很大的潜在价值。结果表明，所提出的识别方法可以获得更高的分类准确率，并且前额叶内活动体素之间以及前额叶和顶叶之间活动体素之间的FC对AD患者的预测具有重要作用。此外，我们还发现，与健康对照组相比，AD组有更多的大脑区域和更多的体素活动。结论：对AD发病机制的研究具有很大的潜在价值。结果表明，所提出的识别方法可以获得更高的分类准确率，并且前额叶内活动体素之间以及前额叶和顶叶之间活动体素之间的FC对AD患者的预测具有重要作用。此外，我们还发现，与健康对照组相比，AD组有更多的大脑区域和更多的体素活动。结论：对AD发病机制的研究具有很大的潜在价值。我们还发现，与健康对照组相比，AD组有更多的大脑区域和更多的体素活动。结论：对AD发病机制的研究具有很大的潜在价值。我们还发现，与健康对照组相比，AD组有更多的大脑区域和更多的体素活动。结论：对AD发病机制的研究具有很大的潜在价值。