Localized instance fusion of MRI data of Alzheimer’s disease for classification based on instance transfer ensemble learning

• Main Authors: Xiaoheng Tan, Yuchuan Liu, Yongming Li, Pin Wang, Xiaoping Zeng, Fang Yan, Xinke Li
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BMC 2018-05-01
• Series: BioMedical Engineering OnLine
• Subjects: Alzheimer’s disease; Magnetic resonance imaging; Instance transfer learning; Classification; Localized instance fusion
• Online Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12938-018-0489-1

Abstract Background Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is very important, and MRI is an effective imaging mode of Alzheimer’s disease. There are many existing studies on the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease based on MRI data. However, there are no studies on the transfer learning between different datasets (including different subjects), thereby improving the sample size of target dataset indirectly. Methods Therefore, a new framework method is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. First, gravity transfer is used to transfer the source domain data closer to the target data set. Secondly, the best deviation between the transferred source domain samples and the target domain samples is searched by instance transfer learning algorithm (ITL) based on wrapper mode, thereby obtaining optimal transferred domain samples. Finally, the optimal transferred domain samples and the target domain training samples are combined for classification. If the source data and the target data have different features, a feature growing algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. Results The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective regardless of different kernel functions, different number of samples and different parameters. Besides, the transferred source domain samples by ITL algorithm can enlarge the target domain training samples and assist to improve the classification accuracy significantly. Conclusions Therefore, the study can enlarge the samples of AD by instance transfer learning, thereby being helpful for the small sample problems of AD. Since the proposed algorithm is a framework algorithm, the study is heuristics to the relevant researchers.