Neuroscience patient identification using big data and fuzzy logic–An Alzheimer’s disease case study

Modern neuroscience imaging technologies considerably affect diagnostic and prognostic accuracy and facilitate progress towards the cure of brain diseases. The benefits largely depend on the practicalities by which the large-scale imaging and clinical data can be integrated, examined and understood. In EU neuGRID4You (N4U) project, many datasets were generated from research centres and hospitals. In order to perform effective analyses, these datasets and their metadata along with a number of pre-computed parameters are stored in a big data repository. This paper focuses on the patient identification using big data and Fuzzy Logic, which has been achieved through fuzzy processing where a reference number called Alzheimers Disease Identification Number (ADIN) is calculated. It has enabled patients sorting for a particular intensity of Alzheimers disease, short-term estimation of the progression of that disease and context of individual patients with respect to other patients such as appropriate treatment, estimated life expectancy etc. The generated rules define the necessary knowledge base for the inference engine to generate output sets and an aggregate membership function of each rule is formed. Using this function, a most representative value of the total output set is obtained which represents the disease intensity. The implemented system and its evaluation are based on realistic datasets, demonstrators and making use of real-life neuroscience case studies. The presented results of four selected case studies show that this approach have provided sufficient expressiveness in understanding patients’ disease information. Finally, a discussion and conclusions are presented on the opportunities offered by the calculation of ADIN to manage Alzheimers disease along with potential future extensions or applications of this work. We are grateful to European Union in funding the neuGRID and neuGRID4You (N4U) (grant agreement no. 283562) projects that has provided grounding to this work. We are also thankful to the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) for sponsoring De Ramón-Fernández (Ref. BES- 2015-073611) to work on a part of this project at the University of the West of England.