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The TADPOLE Challenge compares the performance of algorithms at predicting the future evolution of individuals at risk of Alzheimers disease. TADPOLE Challenge participants train their models and algorithms on historical data from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study. Participants are then required to make forecasts of three key outcomes for ADNI-3 rollover participants: clinical diagnosis, ADAS-Cog 13, and total volume of the ventricles -- which are then compared with future measurements. Strong points of the challenge are that the test data did not exist at the time of forecasting (it was acquired afterwards), and that it focuses on the challenging problem of cohort selection for clinical trials by identifying fast progressors. The submission phase of TADPOLE was open until 15 November 2017; since then data has been acquired until April 2019 from 219 subjects with 223 clinical visits and 150 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, which was used for the evaluation of the participants predictions. Thirty-three teams participated with a total of 92 submissions. No single submission was best at predicting all three outcomes. For diagnosis prediction, the best forecast (team Frog), which was based on gradient boosting, obtained a multiclass area under the receiver-operating curve (MAUC) of 0.931, while for ventricle prediction the best forecast (team EMC1), which was based on disease progression modelling and spline regression, obtained mean absolute error of 0.41% of total intracranial volume (ICV). For ADAS-Cog 13, no forecast was considerably better than the benchmark mixed effects model (BenchmarkME), provided to participants before the submission deadline. Further analysis can help understand which input features and algorithms are most suitable for Alzheimers disease prediction and for aiding patient stratification in clinical trials.
We present the findings of The Alzheimers Disease Prediction Of Longitudinal Evolution (TADPOLE) Challenge, which compared the performance of 92 algorithms from 33 international teams at predicting the future trajectory of 219 individuals at risk of Alzheimers disease. Challenge participants were required to make a prediction, for each month of a 5-year future time period, of three key outcomes: clinical diagnosis, Alzheimers Disease Assessment Scale Cognitive Subdomain (ADAS-Cog13), and total volume of the ventricles. No single submission was best at predicting all three outcomes. For clinical diagnosis and ventricle volume prediction, the best algorithms strongly outperform simple baselines in predictive ability. However, for ADAS-Cog13 no single submitted prediction method was significantly better than random guessing. Two ensemble methods based on taking the mean and median over all predictions, obtained top scores on almost all tasks. Better than average performance at diagnosis prediction was generally associated with the additional inclusion of features from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). On the other hand, better performance at ventricle volume prediction was associated with inclusion of summary statistics, such as patient-specific biomarker trends. The submission system remains open via the website https://tadpole.grand-challenge.org, while code for submissions is being collated by TADPOLE SHARE: https://tadpole-share.github.io/. Our work suggests that current prediction algorithms are accurate for biomarkers related to clinical diagnosis and ventricle volume, opening up the possibility of cohort refinement in clinical trials for Alzheimers disease.
In order to find effective treatments for Alzheimers disease (AD), we need to identify subjects at risk of AD as early as possible. To this end, recently developed disease progression models can be used to perform early diagnosis, as well as predict the subjects disease stages and future evolution. However, these models have not yet been applied to rare neurodegenerative diseases, are not suitable to understand the complex dynamics of biomarkers, work only on large multimodal datasets, and their predictive performance has not been objectively validated. In this work I developed novel models of disease progression and applied them to estimate the progression of Alzheimers disease and Posterior Cortical atrophy, a rare neurodegenerative syndrome causing visual deficits. My first contribution is a study on the progression of Posterior Cortical Atrophy, using models already developed: the Event-based Model (EBM) and the Differential Equation Model (DEM). My second contribution is the development of DIVE, a novel spatio-temporal model of disease progression that estimates fine-grained spatial patterns of pathology, potentially enabling us to understand complex disease mechanisms relating to pathology propagation along brain networks. My third contribution is the development of Disease Knowledge Transfer (DKT), a novel disease progression model that estimates the multimodal progression of rare neurodegenerative diseases from limited, unimodal datasets, by transferring information from larger, multimodal datasets of typical neurodegenerative diseases. My fourth contribution is the development of novel extensions for the EBM and the DEM, and the development of novel measures for performance evaluation of such models. My last contribution is the organization of the TADPOLE challenge, a competition which aims to identify algorithms and features that best predict the evolution of AD.
Accurate diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease (AD) entails clinical evaluation of multiple cognition metrics and biomarkers. Metrics such as the Alzheimers Disease Assessment Scale - Cognitive test (ADAS-cog) comprise multiple subscores that quantify different aspects of a patients cognitive state such as learning, memory, and language production/comprehension. Although computer-aided diagnostic techniques for classification of a patients current disease state exist, they provide little insight into the relationship between changes in brain structure and different aspects of a patients cognitive state that occur over time in AD. We have developed a Convolutional Neural Network architecture that can concurrently predict the trajectories of the 13 subscores comprised by a subjects ADAS-cog examination results from a current minimally preprocessed structural MRI scan up to 36 months from image acquisition time without resorting to manual feature extraction. Mean performance metrics are within range of those of existing techniques that require manual feature selection and are limited to predicting aggregate scores.
Background:Cognitive assessments represent the most common clinical routine for the diagnosis of Alzheimers Disease (AD). Given a large number of cognitive assessment tools and time-limited office visits, it is important to determine a proper set of cognitive tests for different subjects. Most current studies create guidelines of cognitive test selection for a targeted population, but they are not customized for each individual subject. In this manuscript, we develop a machine learning paradigm enabling personalized cognitive assessments prioritization. Method: We adapt a newly developed learning-to-rank approach PLTR to implement our paradigm. This method learns the latent scoring function that pushes the most effective cognitive assessments onto the top of the prioritization list. We also extend PLTR to better separate the most effective cognitive assessments and the less effective ones. Results: Our empirical study on the ADNI data shows that the proposed paradigm outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on identifying and prioritizing individual-specific cognitive biomarkers. We conduct experiments in cross validation and level-out validation settings. In the two settings, our paradigm significantly outperforms the best baselines with improvement as much as 22.1% and 19.7%, respectively, on prioritizing cognitive features. Conclusions: The proposed paradigm achieves superior performance on prioritizing cognitive biomarkers. The cognitive biomarkers prioritized on top have great potentials to facilitate personalized diagnosis, disease subtyping, and ultimately precision medicine in AD.
Alzheimers disease is the most common cause of dementia. It is the fifth-leading cause of death among elderly people. With high genetic heritability (79%), finding disease causal genes is a crucial step in find treatment for AD. Following the International Genomics of Alzheimers Project (IGAP), many disease-associated genes have been identified; however, we dont have enough knowledge about how those disease-associated genes affect gene expression and disease-related pathways. We integrated GWAS summary data from IGAP and five different expression level data by using TWAS method and identified 15 disease causal genes under strict multiple testing (alpha<0.05), 4 genes are newly identified; identified additional 29 potential disease causal genes under false discovery rate(alpha < 0.05), 21 of them are newly identified. Many genes we identified are also associated with some autoimmune disorder.