Decision Strategies in AI-Based Ensemble Models in Opportunistic Alzheimer’s Detection from Structural MRI

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative condition and the most common form of dementia. Recent developments in AD treatment call for robust diagnostic tools to facilitate medical decision-making. Despite progress for early diagnostic tests, there remains uncertainty about clinical use. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), as a readily available imaging tool in the current AD diagnostic pathway, in combination with artificial intelligence, offers opportunities of added value beyond symptomatic evaluation. However, MRI studies in AD tend to suffer from small datasets and consequently limited generalizability. Although ensemble models take advantage of the strengths of several models to improve performance and generalizability, there is little knowledge of how the different ensemble models compare performance-wise and the relationship between detection performance and model calibration. The latter is especially relevant for clinical translatability. In our study, we applied three ensemble decision strategies with three different deep learning architectures for multi-class AD detection with structural MRI. For two of the three architectures, the weighted average was the best decision strategy in terms of balanced accuracy and calibration error. In contrast to the base models, the results of the ensemble models showed that the best detection performance corresponded to the lowest calibration error, independent of the architecture. For each architecture, the best ensemble model reduced the estimated calibration error compared to the base model average from (1) 0.174±0.01 to 0.164±0.04, (2) 0.182±0.02 to 0.141±0.04, and (3) 0.269±0.08 to 0.240±0.04 and increased the balanced accuracy from (1) 0.527±0.05 to 0.608±0.06, (2) 0.417±0.03 to 0.456±0.04, and (3) 0.348±0.02 to 0.371±0.03.