Early detection and characterization of Alzheimer's disease in clinical scenarios using Bioprofile concepts and K-means

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disease in elderly people. There is a need for objective means to detect AD early to allow targeted interventions and to monitor response to treatment. To help clinicians in these tasks, we propose the creation of the Bioprofile of AD. A Bioprofile should reveal key patterns of a disease in the subject's biodata. We applied k-means clustering to data features taken from the ADNI database to divide the subjects into pathologic and non-pathologic groups in five clinical scenarios. The preliminary results confirm previous findings and show that there is an important AD pattern in the biodata of controls, AD, and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients. Furthermore, the Bioprofile could help in the early detection of AD at the MCI stage since it divided the MCI subjects into groups with different rates of conversion to AD.