Adapting Machine Learning Diagnostic Models to New Populations Using a Small Amount of Data: Results from Clinical Neuroscience

Machine learning (ML) is revolutionizing many areas of engineering and science, including healthcare. However, it is also facing a reproducibility crisis, especially in healthcare. ML models that are carefully constructed from and evaluated on data from one part of the population may not generalize well on data from a different population group, or acquisition instrument settings and acquisition protocols. We tackle this problem in the context of neuroimaging of Alzheimer's disease (AD), schizophrenia (SZ) and brain aging. We develop a weighted empirical risk minimization approach that optimally combines data from a source group, e.g., subjects are stratified by attributes such as sex, age group, race and clinical cohort to make predictions on a target group, e.g., other sex, age group, etc. using a small fraction (10%) of data from the target group. We apply this method to multi-source data of 15,363 individuals from 20 neuroimaging studies to build ML models for diagnosis of AD and SZ, and estimation of brain age. We found that this approach achieves substantially better accuracy than existing domain adaptation techniques: it obtains area under curve greater than 0.95 for AD classification, area under curve greater than 0.7 for SZ classification and mean absolute error less than 5 years for brain age prediction on all target groups, achieving robustness to variations of scanners, protocols, and demographic or clinical characteristics. In some cases, it is even better than training on all data from the target group, because it leverages the diversity and size of a larger training set. We also demonstrate the utility of our models for prognostic tasks such as predicting disease progression in individuals with mild cognitive impairment. Critically, our brain age prediction models lead to new clinical insights regarding correlations with neurophysiological tests. In summary, we present a relatively simple methodology, along with ample experimental evidence, supporting the good generalization of ML models to new datasets and patient cohorts.