Multimodal AI for biomarker and etiological assessment of dementias, Vijaya B. Kolachalama

Abstract: Differential diagnosis of dementia poses significant challenges due to overlapping symptoms across etiologies and the high cost and limited accessibility of gold-standard biomarker assessments like PET imaging. In this talk, I will present multimodal AI frameworks that integrate readily available clinical data including demographics, medical history, neuropsychological testing, functional assessments, and neuroimaging, with advanced deep learning techniques to enhance etiological classification and biomarker estimation in dementias. One approach handles missing data robustly while identifying 10 distinct dementia etiologies, including mixed pathologies. Systematic validation shows predictions align with biomarkers, postmortem pathology, and biological outcomes; AI augmentation also improves neurologist diagnostic accuracy in clinical assessments. Complementing this, another framework predicts individual amyloid-β and tau PET profiles from accessible assessments, with results correlating to established profiles, postmortem findings, and known pathological patterns. Together, these scalable tools provide practical alternatives for etiological stratification, biomarker pre-screening, and trial enrichment.

Bio:  Vijaya Kolachalama is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medicine & Computer Science at Boston University (BU). He is also one of the founding members of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at BU. Before joining BU, he was a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Draper Laboratory and a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, where he also served as an ORISE Fellow at the US Food & Drug Administration. His laboratory develops methods at the intersection of AI and human health with a focus on neurodegenerative conditions. His research is supported by grants from the American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health (NIA, NCI, NIDDK, NHLBI and NINDS), Gates Ventures, and Johnson & Johnson Enterprise Innovation. Dr. Kolachalama is a Senior Member of IEEE, Toffler Scholar in Neuroscience and a Fellow of the American Heart Association, actively working with industry and investment communities to translate software technologies to the clinic.