Preliminary study of substantia nigra analysis by tensorial feature extraction

Hayato Itoh, Masahiro Oda, Shinji Saiki, Koji Kamagata, Wataru Sako, Keiichi Ishikawa, Nobutaka Hattori, Shigeki Aoki, Kensaku Mori

Abstract: Parkinson disease (PD) is a common progressive neurodegenerative disorder in our ageing society. Early-stage PD biomarkers are desired for timely clinical intervention and understanding of pathophysiology. Since one of the characteristics of PD is the progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta, we propose a feature extraction method for analysing the differences in the substantia nigra between PD and non-PD patients.