AUTHOR=Tafuri Benedetta , Filardi Marco , Urso Daniele , De Blasi Roberto , Rizzo Giovanni , Nigro Salvatore , Logroscino Giancarlo 

TITLE=Radiomics Model for Frontotemporal Dementia Diagnosis Using T1-Weighted MRI

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.828029

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2022.828029

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=Radiomics has been proposed as a useful approach to extrapolate novel morphological and textural information from brain MRI. Radiomics analysis has shown unique potential in the diagnostic work-up and in the follow-up of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. However, the potentiality of this technique in distinguishing frontotemporal dementia (FTD) subtypes has so far not been investigated. 
In this study we explored the usefulness of radiomic features in differentiating FTD subtypes, namely the behavioral variant of FTD (bvFTD), the nonfluent and/or agrammatic (PNFA) and semantic (svPPA) variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Classification analyses were performed on 3 Tesla T1-weighted images obtained from the Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative. We included 49 bvFTD, 25 PNFA, 34 svPPA patients and 60 healthy controls. Texture analyses were conducted to define the first-order statistic and textural features in cortical and subcortical brain regions. Recursive feature elimination was used to select the radiomics signature for each pairwise comparison followed by a classification framework based on a support vector machine. Finally, a ten-fold cross validation was used to assess classification performances.
Radiomics-based approach successfully identified the brain regions typically involved in each FTD subtypes achieving a mean accuracy of more than 80% in distinguishing between patient groups. Noteworthy, radiomics features extracted in the left temporal regions allowed achieving an accuracy of 91% and 94% in distinguishing patients with svPPA from those with PNFA and bvFTD, respectively.
	Radiomics features show excellent classification performances in distinguishing FTD subtypes, supporting the clinical usefulness of this approach in the diagnostic work-up of FTD.