🍩 Database of Original & Non-Theoretical Uses of Topology

(found 4 matches in 0.00134s)
  1. Topological Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Betti Curves (2021)

    Ameer Saadat-Yazdi, Rayna Andreeva, Rik Sarkar
    Abstract Alzheimer’s disease is a debilitating disease in the elderly, and is an increasing burden to the society due to an aging population. In this paper, we apply topological data analysis to structural MRI scans of the brain, and show that topological invariants make accurate predictors for Alzheimer’s. Using the construct of Betti Curves, we first show that topology is a good predictor of Age. Then we develop an approach to factor out the topological signature of age from Betti curves, and thus obtain accurate detection of Alzheimer’s disease. Experimental results show that topological features used with standard classifiers perform comparably to recently developed convolutional neural networks. These results imply that topology is a major aspect of structural changes due to aging and Alzheimer’s. We expect this relation will generate further insights for both early detection and better understanding of the disease.
  2. Constructing Shape Spaces From a Topological Perspective (2017)

    Christoph Hofer, Roland Kwitt, Marc Niethammer, Yvonne Höller, Eugen Trinka, Andreas Uhl
    Abstract We consider the task of constructing (metric) shape space(s) from a topological perspective. In particular, we present a generic construction scheme and demonstrate how to apply this scheme when shape is interpreted as the differences that remain after factoring out translation, scaling and rotation. This is achieved by leveraging a recently proposed injective functional transform of 2D/3D (binary) objects, based on persistent homology. The resulting shape space is then equipped with a similarity measure that is (1) by design robust to noise and (2) fulfills all metric axioms. From a practical point of view, analyses of object shape can then be carried out directly on segmented objects obtained from some imaging modality without any preprocessing, such as alignment, smoothing, or landmark selection. We demonstrate the utility of the approach on the problem of distinguishing segmented hippocampi from normal controls vs. patients with Alzheimer’s disease in a challenging setup where volume changes are no longer discriminative.
  3. Topology-Based Kernels With Application to Inference Problems in Alzheimer’s Disease (2011)

    Deepti Pachauri, Chris Hinrichs, Moo K. Chung, Sterling C. Johnson, Vikas Singh
    Abstract Alzheimer’s disease (AD) research has recently witnessed a great deal of activity focused on developing new statistical learning tools for automated inference using imaging data. The workhorse for many of these techniques is the Support Vector Machine (SVM) framework (or more generally kernel based methods). Most of these require, as a first step, specification of a kernel matrix between input examples (i.e., images). The inner product between images Ii and Ij in a feature space can generally be written in closed form, and so it is convenient to treat as “given”. However, in certain neuroimaging applications such an assumption becomes problematic. As an example, it is rather challenging to provide a scalar measure of similarity between two instances of highly attributed data such as cortical thickness measures on cortical surfaces. Note that cortical thickness is known to be discriminative for neurological disorders, so leveraging such information in an inference framework, especially within a multi-modal method, is potentially advantageous. But despite being clinically meaningful, relatively few works have successfully exploited this measure for classification or regression. Motivated by these applications, our paper presents novel techniques to compute similarity matrices for such topologically-based attributed data. Our ideas leverage recent developments to characterize signals (e.g., cortical thickness) motivated by the persistence of their topological features, leading to a scheme for simple constructions of kernel matrices. As a proof of principle, on a dataset of 356 subjects from the ADNI study, we report good performance on several statistical inference tasks without any feature selection, dimensionality reduction, or parameter tuning.