Machine learning approach effectively discriminates between Parkinson’s disease and progressive supranuclear palsy: Multi-level indices of rs-fMRI

Aim

Parkinson’s disease (PD) and progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) present similar clinical symptoms, but their treatment options and clinical prognosis differ significantly. Therefore, we aimed to discriminate between PD and PSP based on multi-level indices of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) via the machine learning approach.

Materials and methods

A total of 58 PD and 52 PSP patients were prospectively enrolled in this study. Participants were randomly allocated to a training set and a validation set in a 7:3 ratio. Various rs-fMRI indices were extracted, followed by a comprehensive feature screening for each index. We constructed fifteen distinct combinations of indices and selected four machine learning algorithms for model development. Subsequently, different validation templates were employed to assess the classification results and investigate the relationship between the most significant features and clinical assessment scales.

Results

The classification performance of logistic regression (LR) and support vector machine (SVM) models, based on multiple index combinations, was significantly superior to that of other machine learning models and combinations when utilizing automatic anatomical labeling (AAL) templates. This has been verified across different templates.

Conclusions

The utilization of multiple rs-fMRI indices significantly enhances the performance of machine learning models and can effectively achieve the automatic identification of PD and PSP at the individual level.