Data-driven techniques for translational neuroscience and personalized neuro-health

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) such as depression and apathy are common in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and often precede cognitive decline. NPS assessments hold promise as early detection markers due to their correlation with disease progression and their non-invasive nature. Yet current tools cannot distinguish whether NPS are part of aging or early signs of AD, limiting their utility. We present a deep learning-based normative modelling framework to identify atypical NPS burden from structural MRI. A 3D convolutional neural network was trained on cognitively stable participants from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, learning the mapping between brain anatomy and Neuropsychiatric Inventory Questionnaire (NPIQ) scores. Deviations between predicted and observed scores defined the Divergence from NPIQ scores (DNPI). Higher DNPI was associated with future AD conversion (adjusted OR=2.5; p < 0.01) and achieved predictive accuracy comparable to cerebrospinal fluid AB42 (AUC=0.74 vs 0.75). Our approach supports scalable, non-invasive strategies for early AD detection.

As two most prevalent neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs), Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD) shared commonalities both in symptomology and pathophysiology. However, to what extent and in what way these two distinct disorders overlap remain underexplored. In this study, we propose an explicit, interpretable and spatially adaptive transfer learning framework to elucidate the morphometric biomarkers linked to AD and PD. We applied such high-dimensional machine learning model to two most popular open-source neuroimaging datasets, i.e., Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI). On the one hand, our cross-disorder classifier revealed neuro-anatomical alteration patterns well aligning with previous neuroimaging research findings and underscoring patients' clinical presentations. On the other hand, the spatially adaptive trained classifier using shared prior achieved statistically superior diagnostic performance compared to respective individual models, which further highlights the cross-disorder framework's efficacy on modeling limited-size datasets across disease domains.

Worldwide, millions of senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer disease abbreviated as AD, a well- versed form of dementia. AD is featured by amnesia, intellectual disability, and difficulty with consciousness. DL and ML models are undoubtedly explored to identify AD related patterns on large dimensional neuroimaging data but they need global optimization and are suffering from overfitting issue that might yield dissatisfactory result in testing data set. DL overcomes the issue by convolution of input image with kernel but any sudden change in the MRI image or human manipulation, limited pre- processing of the images can mislead CNN in achieving highly accurate detection. Transfer Learning (TL) has proved itself in AD diagnosis by utilizing pre-trained models on large data sets to guide novice model in a new neuroimaging dataset. This review provides an inclusive glimpse of TL implication in classification, identification including the conversion of AD. Keeping in view, we have assessed the strengths and limitations of TL in improvising diagnostic accuracy even with limited data. The uniqueness of the present review is the incorporation of explainable AI in TL based AD diagnosis system. Finally, it can be claimed that the review will guide the new re-searchers in the area of TL induced neurodegenerative disease detection.