scholarly journals Ambient Intelligence Based on IoT for Assisting People with Alzheimer’s Disease Through Context Histories

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1260
Author(s):  
Savanna Denega Machado ◽  
João Elison da Rosa Tavares ◽  
Márcio Garcia Martins ◽  
Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa ◽  
Gabriel Villarrubia González ◽  
...  

New Internet of Things (IoT) applications are enabling the development of projects that help with monitoring people with different diseases in their daily lives. Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects neurological functions and needs support to maintain maximum independence and security of patients during this stage of life, as the cure and reversal of symptoms have not yet been discovered. The IoT-based monitoring system provides the caregivers’ support in monitoring people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This paper presents an ontology-based computational model that receives physiological data from external IoT applications, allowing identification of potentially dangerous behaviors for patients with AD. The main scientific contribution of this work is the specification of a model focusing on Alzheimer’s disease using the analysis of context histories and context prediction, which, considering the state of the art, is the only one that uses analysis of context histories to perform predictions. In this research, we also propose a simulator to generate activities of the daily life of patients, allowing the creation of data sets. These data sets were used to evaluate the contributions of the model and were generated according to the standardization of the ontology. The simulator generated 1026 scenarios applied to guide the predictions, which achieved average accurary of 97.44%. The experiments also allowed the learning of 20 relevant lessons on technological, medical, and methodological aspects that are recorded in this article.

Author(s):  
Mark Ellisman ◽  
Maryann Martone ◽  
Gabriel Soto ◽  
Eleizer Masliah ◽  
David Hessler ◽  
...  

Structurally-oriented biologists examine cells, tissues, organelles and macromolecules in order to gain insight into cellular and molecular physiology by relating structure to function. The understanding of these structures can be greatly enhanced by the use of techniques for the visualization and quantitative analysis of three-dimensional structure. Three projects from current research activities will be presented in order to illustrate both the present capabilities of computer aided techniques as well as their limitations and future possibilities.The first project concerns the three-dimensional reconstruction of the neuritic plaques found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. We have developed a software package “Synu” for investigation of 3D data sets which has been used in conjunction with laser confocal light microscopy to study the structure of the neuritic plaque. Tissue sections of autopsy samples from patients with Alzheimer's disease were double-labeled for tau, a cytoskeletal marker for abnormal neurites, and synaptophysin, a marker of presynaptic terminals.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Wei Qin ◽  
Wenwen Li ◽  
Qi Wang ◽  
Min Gong ◽  
Tingting Li ◽  
...  

Background: The global race-dependent association of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype is not well understood. Transethnic analysis of APOE could clarify the role of genetics in AD risk across populations. Objective: This study aims to determine how race and APOE genotype affect the risks for AD. Methods: We performed a systematic search of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library since 1993 to Aug 25, 2020. A total of 10,395 reports were identified, and 133 were eligible for analysis with data on 77,402 participants. Studies contained AD clinical diagnostic and APOE genotype data. Homogeneous data sets were pooled in case-control analyses. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for developing AD were calculated for populations of different races and APOE genotypes. Results: The proportion of APOE genotypes and alleles differed between populations of different races. Results showed that APOE ɛ4 was a risk factor for AD, whereas APOE ɛ2 protected against it. The effects of APOE ɛ4 and ɛ2 on AD risk were distinct in various races, they were substantially attenuated among Black people. Sub-group analysis found a higher frequency of APOE ɛ4/ɛ4 and lower frequency of APOE ɛ3/ɛ3 among early-onset AD than late-onset AD in a combined group and different races. Conclusion: Our meta-analysis suggests that the association of APOE genotypes and AD differ between races. These results enhance our understanding of APOE-related risk for AD across race backgrounds and provide new insights into precision medicine for AD.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 1244
Author(s):  
Anna Yang ◽  
Boris Kantor ◽  
Ornit Chiba-Falek

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has a critical unmet medical need. The consensus around the amyloid cascade hypothesis has been guiding pre-clinical and clinical research to focus mainly on targeting beta-amyloid for treating AD. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the clinical trials have repeatedly failed, prompting the urgent need to refocus on other targets and shifting the paradigm of AD drug development towards precision medicine. One such emerging target is apolipoprotein E (APOE), identified nearly 30 years ago as one of the strongest and most reproduceable genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD). An exploration of APOE as a new therapeutic culprit has produced some very encouraging results, proving that the protein holds promise in the context of LOAD therapies. Here, we review the strategies to target APOE based on state-of-the-art technologies such as antisense oligonucleotides, monoclonal antibodies, and gene/base editing. We discuss the potential of these initiatives in advancing the development of novel precision medicine therapies to LOAD.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Hampel ◽  
Leslie M. Shaw ◽  
Paul Aisen ◽  
Christopher Chen ◽  
Alberto Lleó ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Bloch ◽  
Christoph M. Friedrich

Abstract Background: The prediction of whether Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI) subjects will prospectively develop Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is important for the recruitment and monitoring of subjects for therapy studies. Machine Learning (ML) is suitable to improve early AD prediction. The etiology of AD is heterogeneous, which leads to noisy data sets. Additional noise is introduced by multicentric study designs and varying acquisition protocols. This article examines whether an automatic and fair data valuation method based on Shapley values can identify subjects with noisy data. Methods: An ML-workow was developed and trained for a subset of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) cohort. The validation was executed for an independent ADNI test data set and for the Australian Imaging, Biomarker and Lifestyle Flagship Study of Ageing (AIBL) cohort. The workow included volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) feature extraction, subject sample selection using data Shapley, Random Forest (RF) and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) for model training and Kernel SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) values for model interpretation. This model interpretation enables clinically relevant explanation of individual predictions. Results: The XGBoost models which excluded 116 of the 467 subjects from the training data set based on their Logistic Regression (LR) data Shapley values outperformed the models which were trained on the entire training data set and which reached a mean classification accuracy of 58.54 % by 14.13 % (8.27 percentage points) on the independent ADNI test data set. The XGBoost models, which were trained on the entire training data set reached a mean accuracy of 60.35 % for the AIBL data set. An improvement of 24.86 % (15.00 percentage points) could be reached for the XGBoost models if those 72 subjects with the smallest RF data Shapley values were excluded from the training data set. Conclusion: The data Shapley method was able to improve the classification accuracies for the test data sets. Noisy data was associated with the number of ApoEϵ4 alleles and volumetric MRI measurements. Kernel SHAP showed that the black-box models learned biologically plausible associations.


1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 885-901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Della Sala ◽  
Marcella Laiacona ◽  
Hans Spinnler ◽  
Chiara Ubezio

SynopsisThe aim of the study is to provide (i) a standardized procedure for a Cancellation Test of Digits, designed to assess in the visual modality selective attention deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and (ii) a detailed analysis of how patients cope with it.Age-, education-, and sex-adjusted normative scores earned by 352 healthy controls are set forth, as well as data yielded by the Digit Cancellation Test in 74 Alzheimer patients, in 26 patients with a CT-assessed frontal lobe lesion and in a group of 24 healthy subjects urged to perform the task with a shortened time-constraint. Findings include discriminant power of Alzheimer patients versus healthy controls, sensitivity to cognitive evolution of the dementing process and analysis of errors. Attention data failed to supply psychometric support for the posterior-to-anterior algorithm of progressive cortical encroachment of Alzheimer's disease suggested by PET-findings.Emphasis is put on methodological aspects of neuropsychological research on Alzheimer patients and on the analysis of processing components of the tests employed. Results are discussed in the light of the relationships between psychometric assessments and related functions, and underlying neuronal degeneration.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atif Mehmood ◽  
Muazzam Maqsood ◽  
Muzaffar Bashir ◽  
Yang Shuyuan

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) may cause damage to the memory cells permanently, which results in the form of dementia. The diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease at an early stage is a problematic task for researchers. For this, machine learning and deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches are readily available to solve various problems related to brain image data analysis. In clinical research, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to diagnose AD. For accurate classification of dementia stages, we need highly discriminative features obtained from MRI images. Recently advanced deep CNN-based models successfully proved their accuracy. However, due to a smaller number of image samples available in the datasets, there exist problems of over-fitting hindering the performance of deep learning approaches. In this research, we developed a Siamese convolutional neural network (SCNN) model inspired by VGG-16 (also called Oxford Net) to classify dementia stages. In our approach, we extend the insufficient and imbalanced data by using augmentation approaches. Experiments are performed on a publicly available dataset open access series of imaging studies (OASIS), by using the proposed approach, an excellent test accuracy of 99.05% is achieved for the classification of dementia stages. We compared our model with the state-of-the-art models and discovered that the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art models in terms of performance, efficiency, and accuracy.


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