Interpreting PET scans by structured patient data: a data mining case study in dementia research
One of the goals of medical research in the area of dementia is to correlate images of the brain with clinical tests. Our approach is to start with the images and explain the differences and commonalities in terms of the other variables. First, we cluster Positron emission tomography (PET) scans of patients to form groups sharing similar features in brain metabolism. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time ever that clustering is applied to whole PET scans. Second, we explain the clusters by relating them to non-image variables. To do so, we employ RSD, an algorithm for relational subgroup discovery, with the cluster membership of patients as target variable. Our results enable interesting interpretations of differences in brain metabolism in terms of demographic and clinical variables. The approach was implemented and tested on an exceptionally large data collection of patients with different types of dementia. It comprises 10 GB of image data from 454 PET scans, and 42 variables from psychological and demographical data organized in 11 relations of a relational database. We believe that explaining medical images in terms of other variables (patient records, demographic information, etc.) is a challenging new and rewarding area for data mining research.
pet dementia brain clustering subgroup discovery alzheimer's disease neuro imaging cerad cdr