Monitoring Alzheimer’s Disease Progression in Mild Cognitive Impairment Stage Using Machine Learning-Based FDG-PET Classification Methods

BACKGROUND: We previously introduced a machine learning-based Alzheimer’s Disease Designation (MAD) framework for identifying AD-related metabolic patterns among neurodegenerative subjects. OBJECTIVE: We sought to assess the efficiency of our MAD framework for tracing the longitudinal brain metabolic changes in the prodromal stage of AD. METHODS: MAD produces subject scores using five different machine-learning algorithms, which include a general linear model (GLM), two different approaches of scaled subprofile modeling, and two different approaches of a support vector machine. We used our pre-trained MAD framework, which was trained based on metabolic brain features of 94 patients with AD and 111 age-matched cognitively healthy (CH) individuals. The MAD framework was applied on longitudinal independent test sets including 54 CHs, 51 stable mild cognitive impairment (sMCI), and 39 prodromal AD (pAD) patients at the time of the clinical diagnosis of AD, and two years prior. RESULTS: The GLM showed excellent performance with area under curve (AUC) of 0.96 in distinguishing sMCI from pAD patients at two years prior to the time of the clinical diagnosis of AD while other methods showed moderate performance (AUC: 0.7–0.8). Significant annual increment of MAD scores were identified using all five algorithms in pAD especially when it got closer to the time of diagnosis (p < 0.001), but not in sMCI. The increased MAD scores were also significantly associated with cognitive decline measured by Mini-Mental State Examination in pAD (q < 0.01). CONCLUSION: These results suggest that MAD may be a relevant tool for monitoring disease progression in the prodromal stage of AD.