Adaptive Multi-Cognitive Objective Temporal Task Approach for Predicting AD Progression

Xuanhan Fan, Menghui Zhou, Yu Zhang, Jun Qi, Yun Yang, Po Yang

Abstract: As the population rapidly ages, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, urgently requires the identification of reliable structural brain biomarkers and the development of effective therapeutic strategies. Multiple multi-task learning (MTL) paradigms have been developed to enhance model generalization by sharing information between tasks to predict AD progression and accurately identify MRI-associated biomarkers. Unlike previous MTL approaches that consider only a single kind of cognitive score to predict the complicated AD progression over time, we have developed an innovative MTL method to deal with various cognitive scores simultaneously, with each focusing on different aspects of patient cognition. To effectively capture the intricate associations among different cognitive scores at multiple time points, we first propose an Adaptive Multiple Cognitive Objective Temporal (AMCOT) task-relationship binding penalty mechanism. This mechanism adaptively reveals temporal correlations between various cognitive scores at different time points and uses these relationships to predict cumulative disease progression accurately. To select the most informative MRI features in AD progression, we consider integrating the sparse group Lasso into our model. Our algorithms are designed to handle large datasets efficiently. Empirical evaluation on the Alzheimer’s disease dataset shows that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms in both overall and individual task performance. Additionally, we applied stability selection techniques to identify stable MRI biomarkers and analyzed their temporal patterns to gain insights into AD progression. The implementation source can be found at https://github.com/XuanhanFan/MTL-AMCOT-BB.