Imagine your brain is a bustling city with different neighborhoods communicating through intricate networks of roads. In the case of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), Alzheimer’s disease poses a threat to these pathways. To improve the classification of MCI using machine learning, scientists focus on the hippocampus, an essential hub in the brain’s white matter network. By examining structural and functional connections in the white matter surrounding the hippocampus, researchers can extract key features for diagnosis. Using MRI imaging techniques, they identified regions that show strong connectivity to the hippocampus, creating a hippocampus-related white matter network. By comparing the classification performances of different networks, they discovered that the hippocampus-related network provided the best accuracy (89.4%) and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.954. Notably, they observed that both the hippocampus and thalamus play crucial roles in MCI’s pathological mechanism. These findings contribute to early detection and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease before it fully develops. Curious to explore this fascinating research? Dive into the full article for more!
