We propose an innovative machine learning paradigm enabling precision medicine for AD biomarker discovery. The paradigm tailors the imaging biomarker discovery process to individual characteristics of a given patient. We implement this paradigm using a newly developed learning-to-rank method 𝙿𝙻𝚃𝚁 . The 𝙿𝙻𝚃𝚁 model seamlessly integrates two objectives for joint optimization: pushing up relevant biomarkers and ranking among relevant biomarkers. The empirical study of 𝙿𝙻𝚃𝚁 conducted on the ADNI data yields promising results to identify and prioritize individual-specific amyloid imaging biomarkers based on the individual’s structural MRI data. The resulting top ranked imaging biomarker has the potential to aid personalized diagnosis and disease subtyping.
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PET Imaging of Tau Pathology and Amyloid-β, and MRI for Alzheimer’s Disease Feature Fusion and Multimodal Classification
Background: Machine learning is a promising tool for biomarker-based diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Performing multimodal feature selection and studying the interaction between biological and clinical AD can help to improve the performance of the diagnosis models. Objective: This study aims to formulate a feature ranking metric based on the mutual information index to assess the relevance and redundancy of regional biomarkers and improve the AD classification accuracy. Methods: From the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), 722 participants with three modalities, including florbetapir-PET, flortaucipir-PET, and MRI, were studied. The multivariate mutual information metric was utilized to capture the redundancy and complementarity of the predictors and develop a feature ranking approach. This was followed by evaluating the capability of single-modal and multimodal biomarkers in predicting the cognitive stage. Results: Although amyloid-β deposition is an earlier event in the disease trajectory, tau PET with feature selection yielded a higher early-stage classification F1-score (65.4%) compared to amyloid-β PET (63.3%) and MRI (63.2%). The SVC multimodal scenario with feature selection improved the F1-score to 70.0% and 71.8% for the early and late-stage, respectively. When age and risk factors were included, the scores improved by 2 to 4%. The Amyloid-Tau-Neurodegeneration [AT(N)] framework helped to interpret the classification results for different biomarker categories. Conclusion: The results underscore the utility of a novel feature selection approach to reduce the dimensionality of multimodal datasets and enhance model performance. The AT(N) biomarker framework can help to explore the misclassified cases by revealing the relationship between neuropathological biomarkers and cognition.
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- PAR ID:
- 10348991
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
- Volume:
- 84
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1387-2877
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1497 to 1514
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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