Feature level-based group lasso method for amnestic mild cognitive impairment diagnosis

Background and Objective: Previous studies have indicated that brain morphological measures change in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). However, most existing classification methods cannot take full advantage of these measures. In this study, we improve traditional multitask learning framework by fully considering the relevance among related tasks and supplementary information from other unrelated tasks at the same time. Methods: We propose a feature level-based group lasso (FL-GL) method in which a feature represents the average value of each ROI for each measure. First, we design a correlation matrix in which each row represents the relationship among different measures for each ROI. And this matrix is used to guide the feature selection based on a group lasso framework. Then, we train specific support vector machine (SVM) classifiers with the selected features for each measure. Finally, a weighted voting strategy is applied to combine these classifiers for a final prediction of aMCI from normal control (NC). Results: We use the leave-one-out cross-validation strategy to verify our method on two datasets, the Xuan Wu Hospital dataset and the ADNI dataset. Compared with the traditional method, the results show that the classification accuracies can be improved by 6.12 and 4.92% with the FL-GL method on the two datasets. Conclusions: The results of an ablation study indicated that feature level-based group sparsity term was the core of our method. So, considering correlation at the feature level could improve the traditional multitask learning framework and our FL-GL method obtained better classification performance of patients with MCI and NCs.