Bridging Machine Learning and Clinical Diagnosis: An Explainable Biomarker for ß-Amyloid PET Imaging

[18F]-florbetaben positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is an established marker of ß-Amyloid (Aß) that is being increasingly used to assess Aß deposition in AD. This study presents a novel, explainable machine learning-based biomarker for assessing Aß+ positivity based on [18F]-florbetaben PET scans. We analyzed 163 scans acquired at our institution as part of a retrospective analysis. Initially, we used the regional loadings to train a Cubic Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier and tested the model using 5-fold cross-validation. To elucidate the model's decision-making process in aggregate, we employed local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), projecting the most influential features back onto the AAL atlas for visualization. The Cubic SVM classifier demonstrated robust performance, achieving 92.0 LIME analysis revealed that the model identified critical regions impacting Aß+ status, with notable contributions from the inferior frontal cortex, cuneus, olfactory cortex, postcentral gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, temporal pole, thalamus, and pallidum. The model showcases high accuracy, paralleling expert interpretation levels, and provides critical insights into the brain regions most affected by amyloid deposition. By elucidating the relationship between overall Aß+ status and specific brain regions, our approach holds promise for novel insights into the correlation between the spatial distribution of Aß and the clinical manifestations of AD.