Prediction of conversion to Alzheimer’s disease using deep survival analysis of MRI images

The prediction of the conversion of healthy individuals and those with mild cognitive impairment to the status of active Alzheimer’s disease is a challenging task. Recently, a survival analysis based upon deep learning was developed to enable predictions regarding the timing of an event in a dataset containing censored data. Here, we investigated whether a deep survival analysis could similarly predict the conversion to Alzheimer’s disease. We selected individuals with mild cognitive impairment and cognitively normal subjects and used the grey matter volumes of brain regions in these subjects as predictive features. We then compared the prediction performances of the traditional standard Cox proportional-hazard model, the DeepHit model and our deep survival model based on a Weibull distribution. Our model achieved a maximum concordance index of 0.835, which was higher than that yielded by the Cox model and comparable to that of the DeepHit model. To our best knowledge, this is the first report to describe the application of a deep survival model to brain magnetic resonance imaging data. Our results demonstrate that this type of analysis could successfully predict the time of an individual’s conversion to Alzheimer’s disease.