A 5-min Cognitive Task With Deep Learning Accurately Detects Early Alzheimer's Disease

Introduction: The goal of this study was to investigate and compare the classification performance of machine learning with behavioral data from standard neuropsychological tests, a cognitive task, or both. Methods: A neuropsychological battery and a simple 5-min cognitive task were administered to eight individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), eight individuals with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 41 demographically match controls (CN). A fully connected multilayer perceptron (MLP) network and four supervised traditional machine learning algorithms were used. Results: Traditional machine learning algorithms achieved similar classification performances with neuropsychological or cognitive data. MLP outperformed traditional algorithms with the cognitive data (either alone or together with neuropsychological data), but not neuropsychological data. In particularly, MLP with a combination of summarized scores from neuropsychological tests and the cognitive task achieved ~90% sensitivity and ~90% specificity. Applying the models to an independent dataset, in which the participants were demographically different from the ones in the main dataset, a high specificity was maintained (100%), but the sensitivity was dropped to 66.67%. Discussion: Deep learning with data from specific cognitive task(s) holds promise for assisting in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, but future work with a large and diverse sample is necessary to validate and to improve this approach.