Genetic Algorithms for Optimized Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia Using Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography Imaging.

Genetic algorithms have a proven capability to explore a large space of solutions, and deal with very large numbers of input features. We hypothesized that the application of these algorithms to F-Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) may help in diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) by selecting the most meaningful features and automating diagnosis. We aimed to develop algorithms for the three main issues in the diagnosis: discrimination between patients with AD or FTD and healthy controls (HC), differential diagnosis between behavioral FTD (bvFTD) and AD, and differential diagnosis between primary progressive aphasia (PPA) variants.

Machine learning in the clinical and language characterisation of primary progressive aphasia variants.

Introduction: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome of neurodegenerative origin with 3 main variants: non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic. However, there is some controversy about the existence of additional subtypes. Our aim was to study the language and cognitive features associated with a new proposed classification for PPA.