Cortical thickness from MRI to predict conversion from mild cognitive impairment to dementia in Parkinson disease: A machine learning-based model

Background: Group comparison results associating cortical thinning and Parkinson disease (PD) dementia (PDD) are limited in their application to clinical settings. Purpose: To investigate whether cortical thickness from MRI can help predict conversion from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to dementia in PD at an individual level using a machine learning-based model. Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, patients with PD and MCI who underwent MRI from September 2008 to November 2016 were included. Features were selected from clinical and cortical thickness variables in 10 000 randomly generated training sets. Features selected 5000 times or more were used to train random forest and support vector machine models. Each model was trained and tested in 10 000 randomly resampled data sets, and a median of 10 000 areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) was calculated for each. Model performances were validated in an external test set. Results: Forty-two patients progressed to PDD (converters) (mean age, 71 years 6 6 [standard deviation]; 22 women), and 75 patients did not progress to PDD (nonconverters) (mean age, 68 years 6 6; 40 women). Four PDD converters (mean age, 74 years 6 10; four men) and 20 nonconverters (mean age, 67 years 6 7; 11 women) were included in the external test set. Models trained with cortical thickness variables (AUC range, 0.75-0.83) showed fair to good performances similar to those trained with clinical variables (AUC range, 0.70-0.81). Model performances improved when models were trained with both variables (AUC range, 0.80-0.88). In pair-wise comparisons, models trained with both variables more frequently showed better performance than others in all model types. The models trained with both variables were successfully validated in the external test set (AUC range, 0.69-0.84). Conclusion: Cortical thickness from MRI helped predict conversion from mild cognitive impairment to dementia in Parkinson disease at an individual level, with improved performance when integrated with clinical variables.