An Approach Towards Development of Computer Aided Monitoring System for Alzheimer's Disease based on MRI Images

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a disorder that affects millions of people in the world, and this number will continue increasing according to all prospects. Other than it is a serious problem that still today there is no cure for this disease, it is of even much more concern the lack of reliability and the tardiness in the diagnosis and monitoring of the disease. Implementation of latest technology into the development of computerized diagnosis system is not new. Many past studies have been looking into this matter by using different sophisticated tools. However, there is yet to find any research on the development of the monitoring system for AD which able to continuously monitor the AD patients, so as to detect any progression symptoms. In this study, a Computer Aided Monitoring (CAM) system is created to monitor the progress of AD patients and provide various data of patients in a system which can be accessed by authorized medical practitioners. To monitor the progress of AD on patients, image processing and analysis were applied to MRI images including the preprocessing stage for improving the images, and segmentation stage using thresholding method. For this system, the MRI data used are from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. The CAM system was developed using Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLAB which consists Log In template, Information template, Patient Data template and the last template is MRI enabling image processing. This system may help the doctors to manage and monitor their AD patient on one system which have the capability of displaying and storing all data related to patients as well as detecting the progression of the disease.