Congratulations to Dr. Parisa Rashidi, Ph.D. candidate Sabyasachi Bandyopadhyay and collaborators whose manuscript entitled, “Variational autoencoder provides proof of concept that compressing CDT to extremely low-dimensional space retains its ability of distinguishing dementia” was recently published in Scientific Reports.

Abstract

The clock drawing test (CDT) is an inexpensive tool to screen for dementia. In this study, we examined if a variational autoencoder (VAE) with only two latent variables can capture and encode clock drawing anomalies from a large dataset of unannotated CDTs (n = 13,580) using self-supervised pre-training and use them to classify dementia CDTs (n = 18) from non-dementia CDTs (n = 20). The model was independently validated using a larger cohort consisting of 41 dementia and 50 non-dementia clocks. The classification model built with the parsimonious VAE latent space adequately classified dementia from non-dementia (0.78 area under receiver operating characteristics (AUROC) in the original test dataset and 0.77 AUROC in the secondary validation dataset). The VAE-identified atypical clock features were then reviewed by domain experts and compared with existing literature on clock drawing errors. This study shows that a very small number of latent variables are sufficient to encode important clock drawing anomalies that are predictive of dementia.

Team members:

• Parisa Rashidi, Ph.D., Associate Professor & J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow, J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Co-Director, Intelligent Critical Care Center (IC3), University of Florida
• Sabyasachi Bandyopadhyay, Ph.D. candidate, J. Crayton Pruitt Family Term Fellow, J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida
• Catherine Dion, B.A., Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, University of Florida
• David J. Libon, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Geriatrics and Gerontology and Professor Department of Psychology, Rowan University
• Catherine Price, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, University of Florida
• Patrick Tighe, M.D., Associate Professor of Anesthesiology; Donn M. Dennis MD Professorship In Anesthetic Innovation; Co-Director, Perioperative Cognitive Anesthesia Network; Associate Professor Of Orthopaedics And Information Systems And Operations Management, University of Florida