Classifying Alzheimer's Disease using MRIs and Transcriptomic Data

Early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases is essential for the effectiveness of treatments to delay the onset of related symptoms. Our focus is on methods to aid in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease, the most widespread neurocognitive disorder, that rely on data acquired by non-invasive techniques and that are compatible with the limitations imposed by pandemic situations. Here, we propose integrating multi-modal data consisting of omics (gene expression values extracted by blood samples) and imaging (magnetic resonance images) data, both available for some patients in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative dataset. We show how a suitable integration of omics and imaging data, using well-known machine learning techniques, can lead to better classification results than any of them taken separately, also achieving performance competitive with the state-of-the-art.