Greater accuracy of radiomics compared to deep learning to discriminate normal subjects from patients with dementia: a whole brain 18FDG PET analysis

Abstract

Objective FDG PET imaging plays a crucial role in the evaluation of demented patients by assessing regional cerebral glucose metabolism. In recent years, both radiomics and deep learning techniques have emerged as powerful tools for extracting valuable information from medical images. This article aims to provide a comparative analysis of Radiomics and 3D-deep learning (CNN) approaches in the evaluation of 18F-FDG PET whole-brain images in patients with dementia and normal controls. Methods 18F-FDG brain PET and clinical score were collected in 85 patients with dementia and 125 healthy controls (HC). Patients were assigned to various form of dementia on the basis of clinical evaluation, follow-up and voxels comparison with HC using a two-sample Student’s t-test, to determine the regions of brain involved. Radiomic analysis was performed on the whole brain after normalization to an optimized template. After feature selection using the minimum redundancy maximum relevance method and Pearson’s correlation coefficients, a Neural Network model was tested to find the accuracy to classify HC and demented patients. Twenty subjects not included in the training were used to test the models. The results were compared with those obtained by conventional CNN model. Results Four radiomic features were selected. The validation and test accuracies were 100% for both models, but the probability scores were higher with radiomics, in particular for HC group (P = 0.0004). Conclusion Radiomic features extracted from standardized PET whole brain images seem to be more accurate than CNN to distinguish patients with and without dementia.