Abstract

Cognitive decline accompanies many debilitating illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In old age, brain tissue loss also occurs along with cognitive decline. Although blood tests are easier to perform than brain MRI, few studies compare brain scans to standard blood tests to see which kinds of information best predict future decline. In 504 older adults from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), we first used linear regression to assess the relative value of different types of data to predict cognitive decline, including 196 blood panel biomarkers, 249 MRI biomarkers obtained from the FreeSurfer software, demographics, and the AD-risk gene APOE. A subset of MRI biomarkers was the strongest predictor. There was no specific blood marker that increased predictive accuracy on its own, we found that a novel unsupervised learning method, CorEx, captured weak correlations among blood …

Date

March 21, 2016

Authors

Sarah K Madsen, Greg Ver Steeg, Madelaine Daianu, Adam Mezher, Neda Jahanshad, Talia M Nir, Xue Hua, Boris A Gutman, Aram Galstyan, Paul M Thompson

Conference

Medical Imaging 2016: Image Processing

Volume

9784

Pages

281-286

Publisher

SPIE