Machine learning and deep learning-based approaches on various biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease early detection: A review

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder. It can cause a massive impact on a patient's memory and mobility. As this disease is irreversible, early diagnosis is crucial for delaying the symptoms and adjusting the patient's lifestyle. Many machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) based approaches have been proposed to accurately predict AD before the onset of its symptoms. However, finding the most effective approach for AD early prediction is still challenging. This review explored 24 papers published from 2018 until 2021. These papers have proposed different approaches using state of the art machine learning and deep learning algorithms on different biomarkers to early detect AD. The review explored them from different perspectives to derive potential research gaps and draw conclusions and recommendations. It classified these recent approaches in terms of the learning technique used and AD biomarkers. It summarized and compared their findings, and defined their strengths and limitations. It also provided a summary of the common AD biomarkers. From this review, it was found that some approaches strove to increase the prediction accuracy regardless of their complexity such as using heterogeneous datasets, while others sought to find the most practical and affordable ways to predict the disease and yet achieve good accuracy such as using audio data. It was also noticed that DL based-approaches with image biomarkers remarkably surpassed ML based-approaches. However, they achieved poorly with genetic variants data. Despite the great importance of genetic variants biomarkers, their large variance and complexity could lead to a complex approach or poor accuracy. These data are crucial to discover the underlying structure of AD and detect it at early stages. However, an effective pre-processing approach is still needed to refine these data and employ them efficiently using the powerful DL algorithms.