Mapping the Relationship of Contributing Factors for Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease

While detecting and validating correlations among the contributing factors to the preclinical phase of Alzheimer’s disease (pAD) has been a focus, a potent meta-analysis method to integrate current findings is essential. The entity-relationship diagram with nodes as entities and edges as relationships is a graphical representation that summarizes the relationships among multiple factors in an intuitive manner. Based on this concept, a new meta-analysis approach with this type of diagram is proposed to summarize research about contributing factors of pAD and their interactions. To utilize the information for enriched visualization, width and color of the edges are encoded with reporting times, number of pAD subjects, correlation coefficient, and study design (cross-sectional or longitudinal). The proposed Probabilistic Entity-Relationship Diagram (PERD) demonstrated its effectiveness in this research for studying pAD. Another kind of diagram with occurrence order for some factors was also proposed to provide sequential information of the factors. In addition, PERD could potentially develop into an online application named PERD-online, which would help researchers to pool findings on the same relationships and guide further tests to validate uncertain relationships in PERD. PERD as a generic graphical meta-analysis tool can also be applied in studying other multifactorial diseases.