Predicting progression of Alzheimer's disease using ordinal regression.
Doyle OM., Westman E., Marquand AF., Mecocci P., Vellas B., Tsolaki M., Kłoszewska I., Soininen H., Lovestone S., Williams SCR., Simmons A.
We propose a novel approach to predicting disease progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD)--multivariate ordinal regression--which inherently models the ordered nature of brain atrophy spanning normal aging (CTL) to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD. Ordinal regression provides probabilistic class predictions as well as a continuous index of disease progression--the ORCHID (Ordinal Regression Characteristic Index of Dementia) score. We applied ordinal regression to 1023 baseline structural MRI scans from two studies: the US-based Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the European based AddNeuroMed program. Here, the acquired AddNeuroMed dataset was used as a completely independent test set for the ordinal regression model trained on the ADNI cohort providing an optimal assessment of model generalizability. Distinguishing CTL-like (CTL and stable MCI) from AD-like (MCI converters and AD) resulted in balanced accuracies of 82% (cross-validation) for ADNI and 79% (independent test set) for AddNeuroMed. For prediction of conversion from MCI to AD, balanced accuracies of 70% (AUC of 0.75) and 75% (AUC of 0.81) were achieved. The ORCHID score was computed for all subjects. We showed that this measure significantly correlated with MMSE at 12 months (ρ = -0.64, ADNI and ρ = -0.59, AddNeuroMed). Additionally, the ORCHID score can help fractionate subjects with unstable diagnoses (e.g. reverters and healthy controls who later progressed to MCI), moderately late converters (12-24 months) and late converters (24-36 months). A comparison with results in the literature and direct comparison with a binary classifier suggests that the performance of this framework is highly competitive.