A Deep-Learning Approach for the Prediction of Mini-Mental State Examination Scores in a Multimodal Longitudinal Study

This study introduces a new multimodal deep regression method to predict cognitive test score in a 5-year longitudinal study on Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The proposed model takes advantage of multimodal data that includes cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) levels of tau and beta-amyloid, structural measures from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional and metabolic measures from positron emission tomography (PET), and cognitive scores from neuropsychological tests (Cog), all with the aim of achieving highly accurate predictions of future Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) test scores up to five years after baseline biomarker collection. A novel data augmentation technique is leveraged to increase the numbers of training samples without relying on synthetic data. With the proposed method, the best and most encompassing regressor is shown to achieve better than state-of-the-art correlations of 85.07%(SD=1.59) for 6 months in the future, 87.39% (SD =1.48) for 12 months, 84.78% (SD=2.66) for 18 months, 85.13% (SD=2.19) for 24 months, 81.15% (SD=5.48) for 30 months, 81.17% (SD=4.44) for 36 months, 79.25% (SD=5.85) for 42 months, 78.98% (SD=5.79) for 48 months, 78.93%(SD=5.76) for 54 months, and 74.96% (SD=7.54) for 60 months.