Differential dementia detection from multimodal brain images in a real-world dataset

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Artificial intelligence (AI) models have been applied to differential dementia detection tasks in brain images from curated, high-quality benchmark databases, but not real-world data in hospitals.

METHODS

We describe a deep learning model specially trained for disease detection in heterogeneous clinical images from electronic health records without focusing on confounding factors. It encodes up to 14 multimodal images, alongside age and demographics, and outputs the likelihood of vascular dementia, Alzheimer's, Lewy body dementia, Pick's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and unspecified dementia. We use data from Massachusetts General Hospital (183,018 images from 11,015 patients) for training and external data (125,493 images from 6,662 patients) for testing.

RESULTS

Performance ranged between 0.82 and 0.94 area under the curve (AUC) on data from 1003 sites.

DISCUSSION

Analysis shows that the model focused on subcortical brain structures as the basis for its decisions. By detecting biomarkers in real-world data, the presented techniques will help with clinical translation of disease detection AI.

Highlights

• Our artificial intelligence (AI) model can detect neurodegenerative disorders in brain imaging electronic health record (EHR) data.
• It encodes up to 14 brain images and text information from a single patient's EHR.
• Attention maps show that the model focuses on subcortical brain structures.
• Performance ranged from 0.82 to 0.94 area under the curve (AUC) on data from 1003 external sites.