Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is the prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is a progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. Detection of MCI condition can enable early diagnosis resulting in timely intervention to delay the disease progression. Onset of MCI causes tissue alterations in Corpus Callosum (CC) of the brain. Texture analysis of brain Magnetic Resonance (MR) images aids in characterising these imperceptible changes. In this study, Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) technique is used to analyse the textural variations in CC to detect MCI condition.

The pre-processed brain MR images are obtained from a public access database. Reaction Diffusion level set is employed to segment CC from sagittal slices of the images. Kernel density estimation method is applied to study the local intensity variations within the segmented CC. Statistical features quantifying these variations are extracted from the KDE values. These features are used to differentiate MCI condition using linear classifiers based on discriminant analysis and support vector machine. The results are compared with conventional Grey Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features for validation.

The KDE-based texture features extracted from CC show significant variation between normal and MCI classes. Results demonstrate that this approach can differentiate MCI condition with high accuracy and specificity of 81.3% and 82.7%, respectively. The KDE-based features perform better when compared with GLCM features for distinguishing MCI.

The KDE-based texture features are able to capture the subtle changes occurring in CC at the MCI stage. This technique achieves comparable performance to other state-of-the-art methods with reduced number of features. Efficiency of the KDE-based texture analysis confirms that the proposed computer assisted technique can be used for mass screening of MCI, which can aid in handling the disease severity.