On the evaluation of disease progression modelling in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a heterogeneous condition that can be viewed as a continuum involving multiple stages from cognitively normal to mild cognitive impairment and finally dementia. Recent works in Disease Progression Modelling (DPM) have attempted to use biomarkers to construct representations of progression that are more informative of patients' status than clinical diagnosis alone. However, there is no clear consensus (Figure 1) regarding the choice of evaluation methods or metrics to facilitate model comparison. We propose the use a simple, universally applicable biomarker‐based baseline to estimate patient‐realigning time‐shifts and subsequently evaluate it against multiple released DPM methods.