Alzheimer Disease Detection Studies: Perspective on Multi-Modal Data

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases, resulting in progressive cognitive decline, and so accurate and timely AD diagnosis is of critical importance. To this end, various medical technologies and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), ranging from biosensors and raw signals to medical imaging, have been used to provide information about the state of AD. In this survey, we aim to provide a review on CAD systems for automated AD detection, focusing on different data types: namely, signals and sensors, medical imaging, and electronic medical records (EMR).

We explored the literature on automated AD detection from 2022-2023. Specifically, we focused on various data resources and reviewed several preprocessing and learning methodologies applied to each data type, as well as evaluation metrics for model performance evaluation. Further, we focused on challenges, future perspectives, and recommendations regarding automated AD diagnosis.

Compared to other modalities, medical imaging was the most common data type. The prominent modality was Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In contrast, studies based on EMR data type were marginal because EMR is mostly used for AD prediction rather than detection. Several challenges were identified: data scarcity and bias, imbalanced datasets, missing information, anonymization, lack of standardization, and explainability.

Despite recent developments in automated AD detection, improving the trustworthiness and performance of these models, and combining different data types will improve usability and reliability of CAD tools for early AD detection in the clinical practice.