Analyzing Brain Atrophy in Dementia Using Computer Vision

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease that is responsible for a debilitating decline in cognitive function. Segmentation techniques are often used to track specific structural abnormalities and changes in the brain to aid in the detection, understanding, and treatment of the disease; however, these techniques are reliant on manual and time-consuming processes carried out by experts. Developing automated techniques to track the changes caused by dementia can significantly reduce the time required to discern the extent of the damage caused by the disease. This work proposes a method based on computer vision to calculate neural atrophy in MRI images to determine the progression of cognitive disease. Using the OpenCV color detection algorithm to analyze the MRI images, the extent of atrophy is obtained from the images and the assigned value indicates the presence and extent of Dementia.