HAVAs: Alzheimer’s Disease Detection using Normative and Pathological Lifespan Models

In this paper, we present an innovative MRI-based method for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) detection and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) prognostic, using lifespan trajectories of brain structures. After a full screening of the most discriminant structures between AD and normal aging based on MRI volumetric analysis of 3032 subjects, we propose a novel Hippocampal-Amygdalo-Ventricular Alzheimer score (HAVAs) based on normative lifespan models and AD lifespan models. During a validation on three external datasets on 1039 subjects, our approach showed very accurate detection (AUC ≥ 94%) of patients with AD compared to control subjects and accurate discrimination (AUC=78%) between progressive MCI and stable MCI (during a 3 years follow-up). Compared to normative modelling and recent state-of-the-art deep learning methods, our method demonstrated better classification performance. Moreover, HAVAs simplicity makes it fully understandable and thus well-suited for clinical practice or future pharmaceutical trials.