Empowering Self-Detection: A Graphical User Interface Powered by Machine Learning for Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease

OpenAlex English

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is one of the most, if not the most, devastating neurodegenerative diseases that are incurable and progressive. Early diagnosis of AD comes with many promises in terms of medicine, sociology, and economics. Despite the existence of numerous studies that aim for early diagnosis of AD, to the best of our knowledge, there is not a publicly available tool that lets end-users assess AD. To address this gap, we propose a Graphical User Interface (GUI) powered by Machine Learning (ML) that makes self-assessment of AD possible – without any input from medical experts. The developed GUI lets end-users enter various information considering both commonly used features for the diagnosis of AD and the questions available in the gold standard screening tool for the diagnosis of AD, namely the Mini-Mental State Exam. In addition to employing 11 traditional ML algorithms, we propose a novel 1-dimensional (1D) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). All ML models were trained on a gold standard dataset that comprised 373 records from three subject classes as follows: (i) non-demented, (ii) demented, and (iii) converted. Once the end-user enters the required input through the developed GUI, the previously trained ML model assesses the diagnosis of AD through this input in a couple of seconds. According to the experimental results, the proposed novel 1D CNN outperformed the state-of-the-art by obtaining an accuracy as high as 95,3% on the used gold standard dataset.