Prioritization of Cognitive Assessments in Alzheimer's Disease via Learning to Rank using Brain Morphometric Data

Abstract

We propose an innovative machine learning paradigm enabling precision medicine for prioritizing cognitive assessments according to their relevance to Alzheimer’s disease at the individual patient level. The paradigm tailors the cognitive biomarker discovery and cognitive assessment selection process to the brain morphometric characteristics of each individual patient. We implement this paradigm using a newly developed learning-to-rank method PLTR. Our empirical study on the ADNI data yields promising results to identify and prioritize individual-specific cognitive biomarkers as well as cognitive assessment tasks based on the individual’s structural MRI data. The resulting top ranked cognitive biomarkers and assessment tasks have the potential to aid personalized diagnosis and disease subtyping.