Neuroimaging and analytical methods for studying the pathways from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer ’s disease: protocol for a rapid systematic review

The objective of the present study is to investigate the most recent neuroimaging procedures in the domain of prediction of transition from MCI to AD dementia for clinical applications and to systematically discuss the machine learning techniques used for the prediction of MCI conversion.MethodsElectronic databases including PubMed, SCOPUS, and Web of Science will be searched from January 1, 2017, to the date of search commencement to provide a rapid review of the most recent studies that have investigated the prediction of conversion from MCI to Alzheimer ’s using neuroimaging modalities in randomized trial or observational studies. Two reviewers will screen full texts of included papers using predefined eligibility criteria. Studies will be included if addressed research on AD dementia and MCI, explained the results in a way that would be able to report the performance measures such as the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Only studies addressed Alzheimer’s type of dementia and its early-stage MCI using neuroimaging modalities will be included. We will exclude other forms of dementia such as vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia , and Parkinson’s disease. The risk of bias in individual studies will be appraised using an appropriate tool. If feasible, we will conduct a random effects meta-analysis. Sensitivity analyses will be conducted to explore the potential sources of heterogeneity.DiscussionThe information gathered in our study will establish the extent...
Source: Systematic Reviews - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research