Authors: Ognjen (Oggi) Rudovic, Yuria Utsumi, Ricardo Guerrero, Kelly Peterson, Daniel Rueckert, Rosalind W. Picard
Summary: We introduce a novel personalized Gaussian Process Experts (pGPE) model for predicting per-subject ADAS-Cog13 cognitive scores – a significant predictor of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) in the cognitive domain – over the future 6, 12, 18, and 24 months. We start by training a population-level model using multi-modal data from previously seen subjects using a base Gaussian Process (GP) regression. Then, we personalize this model by adapting the base GP sequentially over time to a new (target) subject using domain adaptive GPs, and also by training subject-specific GP. While we show that these models achieve improved performance when selectively applied to the forecasting task (one performs better than the other on different subjects/visits), the average performance per model is suboptimal. To this end, we used the notion of meta learning in the proposed pGPE to design a regressionbased weighting of these expert models, where the expert weights are optimized for each subject and his/her future visit. The results on a cohort of subjects from the ADNI dataset show that this newly introduced personalized weighting of the expert models leads to large improvements in accurately forecasting future ADAS-Cog13 scores and their fine-grained changes associated with the AD progression. This approach has potential to help identify at-risk patients early and improve the construction of clinical trials for AD.
Source: Presented at the Machine Learning for Health Care Conference, 2019