Diagnosing Alzheimer's disease using a self-organising fuzzy classifier

Dementia is one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide. Without treatment currently available to cure dementia or to alter its progressive course, one of the principal goals for dementia care set by the World Health Organization is the early diagnosis in order to promote early and optimal management. In recognition of the potentials of fuzzy systems in effectively dealing with medical data, this chapter investigates the use of a very recently proposed Self-Organising Fuzzy (SOF) classifier for the prediction of Alzheimer's Disease against Mild Cognitive Impairment and being Cognitively Unimpaired with patient observations provided by the renowned Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative repository. The experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of SOF, especially in combined use with the Recursive Feature Elimination feature selection.