AI and Neurological Rare & Neuroimmune Diseases ── Parkinson's ── 2026-10-12

Journals covered and how papers are chosen: see the index

Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism: treatment, trials and AI

• Differentiating early Parkinson's disease from multiple system atrophy on multimodal PET/MRI using atlas-guided segmentation and vision transformer classification.
  Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026-09-25 · Evidence: Observational diagnostic accuracy study (internal validation by 4-fold cross-validation)
  Abstract

  INTRODUCTION: Early differentiation between Parkinson's disease (PD) and multiple system atrophy-parkinsonian type (MSA-P) remains clinically challenging because of overlapping motor symptoms and subtle imaging abnormalities. METHODS: We developed a fully automated multimodal PET/MRI framework for early PD-MSA-P differentiation that integrates atlas-guided subject-specific label generation, nnU-Net segmentation of the caudate nuclei and putamina, multimodal image fusion, and Vision Transformer classification with multi-slice voting (ViT+MSV). A total of 155 early-stage patients, including 121 with PD and 34 with MSA-P, were evaluated using patient-level stratified 4-fold cross-validation. RESULTS: The segmentation model achieved an overall Dice score of 0.853 (95% CI, 0.830-0.877) and an IoU of 0.747 (95% CI, 0.725-0.770). ViT+MSV achieved a cross-validated AUC of 0.947 (95% CI, 0.905-0.981), an accuracy of 0.929 (95% CI, 0.890-0.968), a sensitivity of 0.942 (95% CI, 0.900-0.982), and a specificity of 0.882 (95% CI, 0.765-0.974). The combination of [ 18 F]fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET, [ 11 C]CFT dopamine-transporter PET, and T2-weighted imaging (T2WI) showed the best overall classification performance. Grad-CAM visualizations showed that class-discriminative gradient-based saliency was mainly concentrated on the bilateral putamen. DISCUSSION: These findings suggest that anatomically guided multimodal PET/MRI analysis with transformer-based classification may support early PD-MSA-P differentiation while providing spatially interpretable evidence for model decisions.

  Journal IF-equivalent: 4.8 (OpenAlex 2-year mean citedness, value as of 2026-10-11, retrieved 2026-10-12; not the official Clarivate IF)
  Reference: Cong C, Zhang X, Rifat ST, Tan H, Sun J, Peng W, et al. Differentiating early Parkinson’s disease from multiple system atrophy on multimodal PET/MRI using atlas-guided segmentation and vision transformer classification. Front Aging Neurosci. 2026 Sep 25;18:1928959. doi:10.3389/fnagi.2026.1928959; PMCID: PMC13649701.
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