Title

Preemptive Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia Using Computational Intelligence Techniques

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-23-2022

Publication Title

Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience

Abstract

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a silent disease that causes the brain cells to die progressively, influencing consciousness, behavior, planning ability, and language to name a few. AD increases exponentially with aging, where it doubles every 5-6 years, causing profound implications, such as swallowing difficulties and losing the ability to speak before death. According to the Ministry of Health in Saudi Arabia, AD patients will triple by 2060 to reach 14 million patients worldwide. The rapid rise of patients is caused by the silent progress of the disease, leading to late diagnosis as the symptoms will not be distinguished from normal aging affect. Moreover, with the current medical capabilities, it is impossible to confirm AD with 100% certainty via specific medical examinations. The literature review revealed that most recent publications used images to diagnose AD, which is insufficient for local hospitals with limited imaging capabilities. Other studies that used clinical and demographical data failed to achieve adequate results. Consequently, this study aims to preemptively predict AD in Saudi Arabia by employing machine learning (ML) techniques. The dataset was acquired from King Fahad Specialist Hospital (KFSH) in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, containing standard clinical tests for 152 patients. Four ML algorithms, namely, support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (k-NN), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), were employed to preemptively diagnose the disease. The empirical results demonstrated the robustness of SVM in the pre-emptive diagnosis of AD with accuracy, precision, recall, and area under the receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) of 95.56%, 94.70%, 97.78%, and 0.97, respectively, with 13 features after applying the sequential forward feature selection technique. This model can assist the medical staff in controlling the progression of the disease at low costs.

Volume

2022

First Page

1

Last Page

14

DOI

10.1155/2022/5476714

ISSN

ISSN 1687-5265‎, E-ISSN 1687-5273‎

Rights

Copyright © 2022 Sunday O. Olatunji et al. is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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