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BACKGROUND: Dementia is a general term for several progressive neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease. Timely and accurate detection is crucial for early intervention. Advancements in artificial intelligence present significant potential for using machine learning to aid in early detection.

OBJECTIVE: Summarize the state-of-the-art machine learning-based approaches for dementia prediction, focusing on non-invasive methods, as the burden on the patients is lower. Specifically, the analysis of gait and speech performance can offer insights into cognitive health through clinically cost-effective screening methods.

METHODS: A systematic literature review was conducted following the PRISMA protocol (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). The search was performed on three electronic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed) to identify the relevant studies published between 2017 to 2022. A total of 40 papers were selected for review.

RESULTS: The most common machine learning methods employed were support vector machine followed by deep learning. Studies suggested the use of multimodal approaches as they can provide comprehensive and better prediction performance. Deep learning application in gait studies is still in the early stages as few studies have applied it. Moreover, including features of whole body movement contribute to better classification accuracy. Regarding speech studies, the combination of different parameters (acoustic, linguistic, cognitive testing) produced better results.

CONCLUSIONS: The review highlights the potential of machine learning, particularly non-invasive approaches, in the early prediction of dementia. The comparable prediction accuracies of manual and automatic speech analysis indicate an imminent fully automated approach for dementia detection.

Acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with substantial abnormalities in lipid biology, including changes in the structural lipids that are present in the myelin in the brain. We investigated the relationship between traumatic microstructural changes in white matter from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and quantitative lipidomic changes from blood serum. The study cohort included 103 patients from the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI (CENTER-TBI) study. Diffusion tensor fitting generated fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) maps for the MRI scans while ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry was applied to analyze the lipidome. Increasing severity of TBI was associated with higher MD and lower FA values, which scaled with different lipidomic signatures. There appears to be consistent patterns of lipid changes associating with the specific microstructure changes in the CNS white matter, but also regional specificity, suggesting that blood-based lipidomics may provide an insight into the underlying pathophysiology of TBI.

Weather Normalized Models (WNMs) are modeling methods used for assessing air contaminants under a business-as-usual (BAU) assumption. Therefore, WNMs are used to assess the impact of many events on urban pollution. Recently, different approaches have been implemented to develop WNMs and quantify the lockdown effects of COVID-19 on air quality, including Machine Learning (ML). However, more advanced methods, such as Deep Learning (DL), have never been applied for developing WNMs. In this study, we proposed WNMs based on DL algorithms, aiming to test five DL architectures and compare their performances to a recent ML approach, namely Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM). The concentrations of five air pollutants (CO, NO₂, PM_2.5, SO₂, and O₃) are studied in the city of Quito, Ecuador. The results show that Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (BiRNN) outperform the other algorithms and, consequently, are recommended as appropriate WNMs to quantify the effects of the lockdowns on air pollution. Furthermore, examining the variable importance in the LSTM and BiRNN models, we identify that the most relevant temporal and meteorological features for predicting air quality are Hours (time of day), Index (1 is the first collected data and increases by one after each instance), Julian Day (day of the year), Relative Humidity, Wind Speed, and Solar Radiation. During the full lockdown, the concentration of most pollutants has decreased drastically: −48.75%, for CO, −45.76%, for SO₂, −42.17%, for PM_2.5, and −63.98%, for NO₂. The reduction of this latter gas has induced an increase of O₃ by +26.54%.

AIM: To construct a Treatment Response Index from Multiple Sensors (TRIMS) for quantification of motor state in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) during a single levodopa dose. Another aim was to compare TRIMS to sensor indexes derived from individual motor tasks.

METHOD: Nineteen PD patients performed three motor tests including leg agility, pronation-supination movement of hands, and walking in a clinic while wearing inertial measurement unit sensors on their wrists and ankles. They performed the tests repeatedly before and after taking 150% of their individual oral levodopa-carbidopa equivalent morning dose.Three neurologists blinded to treatment status, viewed patients' videos and rated their motor symptoms, dyskinesia, overall motor state based on selected items of Unified PD Rating Scale (UPDRS) part III, Dyskinesia scale, and Treatment Response Scale (TRS). To build TRIMS, out of initially 178 extracted features from upper- and lower-limbs data, 39 features were selected by stepwise regression method and were used as input to support vector machines to be mapped to mean reference TRS scores using 10-fold cross-validation method. Test-retest reliability, responsiveness to medication, and correlation to TRS as well as other UPDRS items were evaluated for TRIMS.

RESULTS: The correlation of TRIMS with TRS was 0.93. TRIMS had good test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.83). Responsiveness of the TRIMS to medication was good compared to TRS indicating its power in capturing the treatment effects. TRIMS was highly correlated to dyskinesia (R = 0.85), bradykinesia (R = 0.84) and gait (R = 0.79) UPDRS items. Correlation of sensor index from the upper-limb to TRS was 0.89.

CONCLUSION: Using the fusion of upper- and lower-limbs sensor data to construct TRIMS provided accurate PD motor states estimation and responsive to treatment. In addition, quantification of upper-limb sensor data during walking test provided strong results.

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease. Levodopa is mainly used to manage the motor symptoms of PD. However, disease progression and long-term use of levodopa cause reduced medication efficacy and side effects. When that happens, precise individualized dosing schedules are required.

This doctoral thesis in the field of Micro-data analysis introduces an end-to-end solution for the automation of the pharmacological management of PD with levodopa, and offers some insight on levodopa pharmacodynamics. For that purpose, an algorithm that derives objective ratings for the patients’ motor function through wearable sensors is introduced, a method to construct individual patient profiles is developed, and two dosing algorithms for oral and intestinal administration of levodopa are presented. Data from five different sources were used to develop the methods and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms.

The dose automation algorithms can work both with clinical and objective ratings (through wearable devices), and their application was evaluated against dosing adjustments from movement disorders experts. Both dosing algorithms showed promise and their dosing suggestions were similar to those of the clinicians.

The objective ratings algorithm had good test-retest reliability and its application during a clinical study was successful. Furthermore, the method of fitting individual patient models was robust and worked well with the objective ratings algorithm. Finally, a study was carried out that showed that about half the patients on levodopa treatment show reduced response during the afternoon hours, pointing to the need for more precise modelling of levodopa pharmacodynamics.

INTRODUCTION: A treatment response objective index (TRIS) was previously developed based on sensor data from pronation-supination tests. This study aimed to examine the performance of TRIS for medication effects in a new population sample with Parkinson's disease (PD) and its usefulness for constructing individual dose-response models.

METHODS: Twenty-five patients with PD performed a series of tasks throughout a levodopa challenge while wearing sensors. TRIS was used to determine motor changes in pronation-supination tests following a single levodopa dose, and was compared to clinical ratings including the Treatment Response Scale (TRS) and six sub-items of the UPDRS part III.

RESULTS: As expected, correlations between TRIS and clinical ratings were lower in the new population than in the initial study. TRIS was still significantly correlated to TRS (r_s = 0.23, P < 0.001) with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.33. For the patients (n = 17) with a good levodopa response and clear motor fluctuations, a stronger correlation was found (r_s = 0.38, RMSE = 1.29, P < 0.001). The mean TRIS increased significantly when patients went from the practically defined off to their best on state (P = 0.024). Individual dose-response models could be fitted for more participants when TRIS was used for modelling than when TRS ratings were used.

CONCLUSION: The objective sensor index shows promise for constructing individual dose-response models, but further evaluations and retraining of the TRIS algorithm are desirable to improve its performance and to ensure its clinical effectiveness.

OBJECTIVE: Dosing schedules for oral levodopa in advanced stages of Parkinson's disease (PD) require careful tailoring to fit the needs of each patient. This study proposes a dosing algorithm for oral administration of levodopa and evaluates its integration into a sensor-based dosing system (SBDS).

MATERIALS AND METHODS: In collaboration with two movement disorder experts a knowledge-driven, simulation based algorithm was designed and integrated into a SBDS. The SBDS uses data from wearable sensors to fit individual patient models, which are then used as input to the dosing algorithm. To access the feasibility of using the SBDS in clinical practice its performance was evaluated during a clinical experiment where dosing optimization of oral levodopa was explored. The supervising neurologist made dosing adjustments based on data from the Parkinson's KinetiGraph™ (PKG) that the patients wore for a week in a free living setting. The dosing suggestions of the SBDS were compared with the PKG-guided adjustments.

RESULTS: The SBDS maintenance and morning dosing suggestions had a Pearson's correlation of 0.80 and 0.95 (with mean relative errors of 21% and 12.5%), to the PKG-guided dosing adjustments. Paired t test indicated no statistical differences between the algorithmic suggestions and the clinician's adjustments.

CONCLUSION: This study shows that it is possible to use algorithmic sensor-based dosing adjustments to optimize treatment with oral medication for PD patients.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this retrospective study was to investigate if patients with PD, who are treated with levodopa-carbidopa intestinal gel (LCIG), clinically worsen during the afternoon hours and if so, to evaluate whether this occurs in all LCIG-treated patients or in a sub-group of patients.

METHODS: Three published studies were identified and included in the analysis. All studies provided individual response data assessed on the treatment response scale (TRS) and patients were treated with continuous LCIG. Ninety-eight patients from the three studies fulfilled the criteria. T-tests were performed to find differences on the TRS values between the morning and the afternoon hours, linear mixed effect models were fitted on the afternoon hours' evaluations to find trends of wearing-off, and patients were classified into three TRS categories (meaningful increase in TRS, meaningful decrease in TRS, non -meaningful increase or decrease).

RESULTS: In all three studies significant statistical differences were found between the morning TRS values and the afternoon TRS values (p-value <= 0.001 in all studies). The linear mixed effect models had significant negative coefficients for time in two studies, and 48 out of 98 patients (49%) showed a meaningful decrease of TRS during the afternoon hours.

CONCLUSION: The results from all studies were consistent, both in the proportion of patients in the three groups and the value of TRS decrease in the afternoon hours. Based on these findings there seems to be a group of patients with predictable "off" behavior in the later parts of the day. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of feature selection methods on the performance of machine learning methods for quantifying motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Different feature selection methods including step-wise regression, Lasso regression and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) were applied on 88 spatiotemporal features that were extracted from motion sensors during hand rotation tests. The selected features were then used in support vector machines (SVM), decision trees (DT), linear regression, and random forests models to calculate a so-called treatment-response index (TRIS). The validity, testretest reliability and sensitivity to treatment were assessed for each combination (feature selection method plus machine learning method). There were improvements in correlation coefficients and root mean squared error (RMSE) for all the machine learning methods, except DTs, when using the selected features from step-wise regression inputs. Using step-wise regression and SVM was found to have better sensitivity to treatment and higher correlation to clinical ratings on the Unified PD Rating Scale as compared to the combination of PCA and SVM. When assessing the ability of the machine learning methods to discriminate between tests performed by PD patients and healthy controls the results were mixed. These results suggest that the choice of feature selection methods is crucial when working with data-driven modelling. Based on our findings the step-wise regression can be considered as the method with the best performance.

The goal of this study was to develop an algorithm that automatically quantifies motor states (off,on,dyskinesia) in Parkinson's disease (PD), based on accelerometry during a hand pronation-supination test. Clinician's ratings using the Treatment Response Scale (TRS), ranging from -3 (very Off) to 0 (On) to +3 (very dyskinetic), was used as target. For that purpose, 19 participants with advanced PD and 22 healthy persons were recruited in a single center open label clinical trial in Uppsala, Sweden. The trial consisted of single levodopa dose experiments for the people with PD (PwP), where participants were asked to perform standardized wrist rotation tests, using each hand, before and at pre-specified time points after the dose. The participants used wrist sensors containing a 3D accelerometer and gyroscope. Features to quantify the level, variation and asymmetry of the sensor signals, three-level Discrete Wavelet Transform features and approximate entropy measures were extracted from the sensors data. At the time of the tests, the PwP were video recorded. Three movement disorder specialists rated the participants’ state on the TRS scale. A Treatment Response Index from Sensors (TRIS) was constructed to quantify the motor states based on the wrist rotation tests. Different machine learning algorithms were evaluated to map the features derived from the sensor data to the ratings provided by the three specialists. Results from cross validation, both in 10-fold and a leave-one-individual out setting, showed good predictive power of a support vector machine model and high correlation to the TRS scale. Values at the end tails of the TRS scale were under and over predicted due to the lack of observations at those values but the model managed to accurately capture the dose - effect profiles of the patients. In addition, the TRIS had good test-retest reliability on the baseline levels of the PD participants (Intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.83) and reasonable sensitivity to levodopa treatment (0.33 for the TRIS). For a series of test occasions the proposed algorithms provided dose - effect time profiles for participants with PD, which could be useful during therapy individualization of people suffering from advanced PD