  Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in
older people. Despite considerable efforts to find a cure for AD, there is a
99.6% failure rate of clinical trials for AD drugs, likely because AD patients
cannot easily be identified at early stages. This project investigated machine
learning approaches to predict the clinical state of patients in future years
to benefit AD research. Clinical data from 1737 patients was obtained from the
Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database and was processed
using the "All-Pairs" technique, a novel methodology created for this project
involving the comparison of all possible pairs of temporal data points for each
patient. This data was then used to train various machine learning models.
Models were evaluated using 7-fold cross-validation on the training dataset and
confirmed using data from a separate testing dataset (110 patients). A neural
network model was effective (mAUC = 0.866) at predicting the progression of AD
on a month-by-month basis, both in patients who were initially cognitively
normal and in patients suffering from mild cognitive impairment. Such a model
could be used to identify patients at early stages of AD and who are therefore
good candidates for clinical trials for AD therapeutics.
