Distinguishing between dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using mental health records: a classification approach

Publication: ACL Anthology

Wang Z, Ive J, Moylett S, Mueller C, Cardinal RN, Velupillai S, O’Brien J, Stewart R

1 November 2020


While Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) is the second most common type of neurodegenerative dementia following Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), it is difficult to distinguish from AD.

Here the researchers propose a method for DLB detection by using mental health record (MHR) documents from a (3-month) period before a patient has been diagnosed with DLB or AD. The objective is to develop a model that could be clinically useful to differentiate between DLB and AD across datasets from different healthcare institutions.

The researchers cast this as a classification task using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), an efficient neural model for text classification. They experiment with different representation models, and explore the features that contribute to model performances.

In addition, they apply temperature scaling, a simple but efficient model calibration method, to produce more reliable predictions. They believe the proposed method has important potential for clinical applications using routine healthcare records, and for generalising to other relevant clinical record datasets.

To the best of the team’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to distinguish DLB from AD using mental health records, and to improve the reliability of DLB predictions.

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