Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a genetically complex neurodegenerative disease, which leads to irreversible brain damage, severe cognitive problems and ultimately death. A number of clinical trials and study initiatives have been set up to investigate AD pathology, leading to large amounts of high dimensional heterogeneous data (biomarkers) for analysis. This paper focuses on combining clinical features from different modalities, including medical imaging, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), etc., to diagnose AD and predict potential progression. Due to privacy and legal issues involved with clinical research, the study cohort (number of patients) is relatively small, compared to thousands of available biomarkers (predictors). We propose a hybrid pathological analysis model, which integrates manifold learning and Random Vector functional-link network (RVFL) so as to achieve better ability to extract discriminant information with limited training materials. Furthermore, we model (current and future) cognitive healthiness as a regression problem about age. By comparing the difference between predicted age and actual age, we manage to show statistical differences between different pathological stages. Verification tests are conducted based on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. Extensive comparison is made against different machine learning algorithms, i.e. Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP). Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm achieves better results than the comparison targets, which indicates promising robustness for practical clinical implementation.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease, which involves the degeneration of various brain functions, resulting in memory loss, cognitive disorder and death. Large amounts of multivariate heterogeneous medical test data are available for the analysis of brain deterioration. How to measure the deterioration remains a challenging problem. In this study, we first investigate how different regions of the human brain change as the patient develops AD. Correlation analysis and feature ranking are performed based on the feature vectors from different stages of the pathologic process in Alzheimer disease. Then, an automatic diagnosis system is presented, which is based on a hybrid manifold learning for feature embedding and the bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) algorithm for classification.We investigate two different tasks, i.e. diagnosis and progression prediction. Extensive comparison is made against Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT) and Random Subspace (RS) methods. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm yields superior results when compared to the other methods, suggesting promising robustness for possible clinical applications.

This paper describes an approach utilizing both data analysis and visualization to help diabetes patients improve medication compliance. Through information visualization tools, we aim to provide feedback to patients to encourage behavior change. The system has two core building blocks: (1) Data analysis combining several statistical and machine learning models, founded under different principles and assumptions, into a single meta-model for predicting compliance behavior. The aim is to create superior models for behavior prediction - knowledge that can then be translated into patient-centered decision-support tools. (2) Incorporating data analysis and visualization enabling datasets to be turned into knowledge utilities that can intelligently interact with participants by alerting them to any interesting correlations within the data. Such tools could provide feedback indicating, for example, a high-risk to medication non-compliance behavior in which case appropriate resources could be directed to those who need help the most.

Health care providers, clinicians and medical researchers are increasingly faced with heterogeneous data collection and reporting standards from a wide variety of public and private organizations. The storing and categorizing of clinical data related from multiple sources not only leads to several heterogeneous databases, but also results in difficulties in automating analysis on gathered datasets. In this work, a flexible real-time data collection framework that is able to adapt and lend itself to the multiple datasets without compromising future usability and research potential is presented. Features include the ability to easily connect and leverage current database systems with legacy data via bridging technologies, auto-complete of lookup listings from external sources (such as medication and physician repositories) and strict data validation on all data entry fields.