Magnetic resonance support vector machine discriminates essential tremor with rest tremor from tremor-dominant Parkinson disease

Background: The aim of the current study was to distinguish patients who had tremor-dominant Parkinson's disease (tPD) from those who had essential tremor with rest tremor (rET). Methods: We combined voxel-based morphometry-derived gray matter and white matter volumes and diffusion tensor imaging-derived mean diffusivity and fractional anisotropy in a support vector machine (SVM) to evaluate 15 patients with rET and 15 patients with tPD. Dopamine transporter single-photon emission computed tomography imaging was used as ground truth. Results: SVM classification of individual patients showed that no single predictor was able to fully discriminate patients with tPD from those with rET. By contrast, when all predictors were combined in a multi-modal algorithm, SVM distinguished patients with rET from those with tPD with an accuracy of 100%. Conclusions: SVM is an operator-independent and automatic technique that may help distinguish patients with tPD from those with rET at the individual level. © 2014 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.