| Popis: |
People today, in addition to their concerns about getting old and having to go through watching themselves grow weak and wrinkly, are facing an increasing fear of dementia. There are around 47 million people affected by dementia worldwide and the cost associated with providing them health and social care support is estimated to reach 2 trillion by 2030 which is almost equivalent to the 18th largest economy in the world. The most common form of dementia with the highest costs in health and social care is Alzheimer’s disease, which gradually kills neurons and causes patients to lose loving memories, the ability to recognise family members, childhood memories, and even the ability to follow simple instructions. Alzheimer’s disease is irreversible, unstoppable and has no known cure. Besides being a calamity to affected patients, it is a great financial burden on health providers. Health care providers also face a challenge in diagnosing the disease as current methods used to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease rely on manual evaluations of a patient’s medical history and mental examinations such as the Mini-Mental State Examination. These diagnostic methods often give a false diagnosis and were designed to identify Alzheimer’s after stage two when the part of all symptoms are evident. The problem is that clinicians are unable to stop or control the progress of Alzheimer’s disease, because of a lack of knowledge on the patterns that triggered the development of the disease. In this thesis, we explored and investigated Alzheimer’s disease from a computational perspective to uncover different risk factors and present a strategic framework called Early Prediction of Alzheimer’s Disease Framework (EPADf) that would give a future prediction of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Following extensive background research that resulted in the formalisation of the framework concept, prediction approaches, and the concept of ranking the risk factors based on clinical instinct, knowledge and experience using mathematical reasoning, we carried out experiments to get further insight and investigate the disease further using machine learning models. In this study, we used machine learning models and conducted two classification experiments for early prediction of Alzheimer’s disease, and one ranking experiment to rank its risk factors by importance. Besides these experiments, we also presented two logical approaches to search for patterns in an Alzheimer’s dataset, and a ranking algorithm to rank Alzheimer’s disease risk factors based on clinical evaluation. For the classification experiments we used five different Machine Learning models; Random Forest (RF), Random Oracle Model (ROM), a hybrid model combined of Levenberg-Marquardt neural network and Random Forest, combined using Fischer discriminate analysis (H2), Linear Neural Networks (LNN), and Multi-layer Perceptron Model (MLP). These models were deployed on a de-identified multivariable patient’s data, provided by the ADNI (Alzheimer’s disease Neuroimaging Initiative), to illustrate the effective use of data analysis to investigate Alzheimer’s disease biological and behavioural risk factors. We found that the continues enhancement of patient’s data and the use of combined machine learning models can provide an early cost-effective prediction of Alzheimer’s disease, and help in extracting insightful information on the risk factors of the disease. Based on this work and findings we have developed the strategic framework (EPADf) which is discussed in more depth in this thesis. |
