A multimodal multiple kernel learning approach to Alzheimer's disease detection

In neuroimaging-based diagnostic problems, the combination of different sources of information as MR images and clinical data is a challenging task. Their simple combination usually does not provides an improvement if compared with using the best source alone. In this paper, we deal with the well known Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset tackling the AD versus Control task. We use a recently proposed multiple kernel learning approach, called EasyMKL, to combine a huge amount of basic kernels in synergy with a feature selection methodology, pursuing an optimal and sparse solution to facilitate interpretability. Our new approach, called EasyMKLFS, outperforms baselines (e.g. SVM) and state-of-the-art methods as recursive feature elimination and SimpleMKL

Combining heterogeneous data sources for neuroimaging based diagnosis: re-weighting and selecting what is important

Combining neuroimaging and clinical information for diagnosis, as for example behavioral tasks and genetics characteristics, is potentially beneficial but presents challenges in terms of finding the best data representation for the different sources of information. Their simple combination usually does not provide an improvement if compared with using the best source alone. In this paper, we proposed a framework based on a recent multiple kernel learning algorithm called EasyMKL and we investigated the benefits of this approach for diagnosing two different mental health diseases. The well known Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset tackling the Alzheimer Disease (AD) patients versus healthy controls classification task, and a second dataset tackling the task of classifying an heterogeneous group of depressed patients versus healthy controls. We used EasyMKL to combine a huge amount of basic kernels alongside a feature selection methodology, pursuing an optimal and sparse solution to facilitate interpretability. Our results show that the proposed approach, called EasyMKLFS, outperforms baselines (e.g. SVM and SimpleMKL), state-of-the-art random forests (RF) and feature selection (FS) methods