Head Motion Degrades Machine Learning Classification of Alzheimer's Disease from Positron Emission Tomography

Brain positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is broadly used in research and clinical routines to study, diagnose, and stage Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, its potential cannot be fully exploited yet due to the lack of portable motion correction solutions, especially in clinical settings. Head motion during data acquisition has indeed been shown to degrade image quality and induces tracer uptake quantification error. In this study, we demonstrate that it also biases machine learning-based AD classification. We start by proposing a binary classification algorithm solely based on PET images. We find that it reaches a high accuracy in classifying motion corrected images into cognitive normal or AD. We demonstrate that the classification accuracy substantially decreases when images lack motion correction, thereby limiting the algorithm's effectiveness and biasing image interpretation. We validate these findings in cohorts of 128 11C-UCB-J and 173 18F-FDG scans, two tracers highly relevant to the study of AD. Classification accuracies decreased by 10% and 5% on 20 18F-FDG and 20 11C-UCB-J testing cases, respectively. Our findings underscore the critical need for efficient motion correction methods to make the most of the diagnostic capabilities of PET-based machine learning.