A graph-based integration of multimodal brain imaging data for the detection of early mild cognitive impairment (E-MCI)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia in older adults. By the time an individual has been diagnosed with AD, it may be too late for potential disease modifying therapy to strongly influence outcome. Therefore, it is critical to develop better diagnostic tools that can recognize AD at early symptomatic and especially pre-symptomatic stages. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), introduced to describe a prodromal stage of AD, is presently classified into early and late stages (E-MCI, L-MCI) based on severity. Using a graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) method to integrate multimodal brain imaging data and select valid imaging-based predictors for optimizing prediction accuracy, we developed a model to differentiate E-MCI from healthy controls (HC) for early detection of AD. Multimodal brain imaging scans (MRI and PET) of 174 E-MCI and 98 HC participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort were used in this analysis. Mean targeted region-of-interest (ROI) values extracted from structural MRI (voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and FreeSurfer V5) and PET (FDG and Florbetapir) scans were used as features. Our results show that the graph-based SSL classifiers outperformed support vector machines for this task and the best performance was obtained with 66.8% cross-validated AUC (area under the ROC curve) when FDG and FreeSurfer datasets were integrated. Valid imaging-based phenotypes selected from our approach included ROI values extracted from temporal lobe, hippocampus, and amygdala. Employing a graph-based SSL approach with multimodal brain imaging data appears to have substantial potential for detecting E-MCI for early detection of prodromal AD warranting further investigation

Early identification of mild cognitive impairment using incomplete random forest-robust support vector machine and FDG-PET imaging

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia and will be an increasing health problem in society as the population ages. Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered to be a prodromal stage of AD. The ability to identify subjects with MCI will be increasingly important as disease modifying therapies for AD are developed. We propose a semi-supervised learning method based on robust optimization for the identification of MCI from [18F]Fluorodeoxyglucose PET scans. We extracted three groups of spatial features from the cortical and subcortical regions of each FDG-PET image volume. We measured the statistical uncertainty related to these spatial features via transformation using an incomplete random forest and formulated the MCI identification problem under a robust optimization framework. We compared our approach to other state-of-the-art methods in different learning schemas. Our method outperformed the other techniques in the ability to separate MCI from normal controls

Multimodal manifold-regularized transfer learning for MCI conversion prediction

As the early stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has high chance to convert to AD. Effective prediction of such conversion from MCI to AD is of great importance for early diagnosis of AD and also for evaluating AD risk pre-symptomatically. Unlike most previous methods that used only the samples from a target domain to train a classifier, in this paper, we propose a novel multimodal manifold-regularized transfer learning (M2TL) method that jointly utilizes samples from another domain (e.g., AD vs. normal controls (NC)) as well as unlabeled samples to boost the performance of the MCI conversion prediction. Specifically, the proposed M2TL method includes two key components. The first one is a kernel-based maximum mean discrepancy criterion, which helps eliminate the potential negative effect induced by the distributional difference between the auxiliary domain (i.e., AD and NC) and the target domain (i.e., MCI converters (MCI-C) and MCI non-converters (MCI-NC)). The second one is a semi-supervised multimodal manifold-regularized least squares classification method, where the target-domain samples, the auxiliary-domain samples, and the unlabeled samples can be jointly used for training our classifier. Furthermore, with the integration of a group sparsity constraint into our objective function, the proposed M2TL has a capability of selecting the informative samples to build a robust classifier. Experimental results on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by significantly improving the classification accuracy of 80.1 % for MCI conversion prediction, and also outperforming the state-of-the-art methods

Comprehensive Performance Analysis of Neurodegenerative disease Incidence in the Females of 60-96 year Age Group

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and dementia are gradually becoming more prevalent chronic diseases, characterized by the decline in cognitive and behavioral symptoms. Machine learning is revolu-tionising almost all domains of our life, including the clinical system. The application of machine learning has the potential to enormously augment the reach of neurodegenerative care thus building it more proficient. Throughout the globe, there is a massive burden of Alzheimer's and demen-tia cases; which denotes an exclusive set of difficulties. This provides us with an exceptional opportunity in terms of the impending convenience of data. Harnessing this data using machine learning tools and techniques, can put scientists and physicians in the lead research position in this area. The ob-jective of this study was to develop an efficient prognostic ML model with high-performance metrics to better identify female candidate subjects at risk of having Alzheimer's disease and dementia. The study was based on two diverse datasets. The results have been discussed employing seven perfor-mance evaluation measures i.e. accuracy, precision, recall, F-measure, Re-ceiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) area, Kappa statistic, and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Also, a comprehensive performance analysis has been carried out later in the study

Machine Learning for Detection of Cognitive Impairment

The detection of cognitive problems, especially in the early stages, is critical and the method by which it is diagnosed is manual and depends on one or more specialist doctors, to diagnose it as the cognitive decline escalates into the early stage of dementia, e.g., Alzheimer's disease (AD). The early stages of AD are very similar to Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI); it is essential to identify the possible factors associated with the disease. This research aims to demonstrate that automated models can differentiate and classify MCI and AD in the early stages. The present research used a combination of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to identify AD, using gene expressions. The algorithms used for the classification of cognitive problems and healthy people (control) were: Linear Regression, Decision Trees (DT), Naîve Bayes (NB) and Deep Learning (DP). The result of this research shows ML algorithms can identify AD, in early stages, with an 80% accuracy, using a Deep Learning (DL) algorithm.Fil: Diaz, Valeria. Universidad de Palermo. Facultad de Ingeniería; ArgentinaFil: Rodríguez, Guillermo Horacio. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Sistemas Tandil; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Instituto Superior de Ingeniería del Software; Argentin

Computational Language Assessment in patients with speech, language, and communication impairments

Speech, language, and communication symptoms enable the early detection, diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of neurocognitive disease progression. Nevertheless, traditional manual neurologic assessment, the speech and language evaluation standard, is time-consuming and resource-intensive for clinicians. We argue that Computational Language Assessment (C.L.A.) is an improvement over conventional manual neurological assessment. Using machine learning, natural language processing, and signal processing, C.L.A. provides a neuro-cognitive evaluation of speech, language, and communication in elderly and high-risk individuals for dementia. ii. facilitates the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy efficacy in at-risk and language-impaired populations; and iii. allows easier extensibility to assess patients from a wide range of languages. Also, C.L.A. employs Artificial Intelligence models to inform theory on the relationship between language symptoms and their neural bases. It significantly advances our ability to optimize the prevention and treatment of elderly individuals with communication disorders, allowing them to age gracefully with social engagement.Comment: 36 pages, 2 figures, to be submite