Albert Chih-Chieh Yang

Tongze Zhang, Jun-En Ding, Melik Ozolcer et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) has become a prevalent neurodegenerative disease worldwide. Traditional diagnosis still relies heavily on medical imaging and clinical assessment by physicians, which is often time-consuming and resource-intensive in terms of both human expertise and healthcare resources. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly applied to the medical field using electronic health records (EHRs), yet their application in Alzheimer's disease assessment remains limited, particularly given that AD involves complex multifactorial etiologies that are difficult to observe directly through imaging modalities. In this work, we propose leveraging LLMs to perform Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning on patients' clinical EHRs. Unlike direct fine-tuning of LLMs on EHR data for AD classification, our approach utilizes LLM-generated CoT reasoning paths to provide the model with explicit diagnostic rationale for AD assessment, followed by structured CoT-based predictions. This pipeline not only enhances the model's ability to diagnose intrinsically complex factors but also improves the interpretability of the prediction process across different stages of AD progression. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CoT-based diagnostic framework significantly enhances stability and diagnostic performance across multiple CDR grading tasks, achieving up to a 15% improvement in F1 score compared to the zero-shot baseline method.

Jun-En Ding, Anna Zilverstand, Shihao Yang et al.

Dementia disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) exhibit overlapping electrophysiological signatures in EEG that challenge accurate diagnosis. Existing EEG-based methods are limited by full-band frequency analysis that hinders precise differentiation of dementia subtypes and severity stages. We propose a variational mixture of graph neural experts (VMoGE) that integrates frequency-specific biomarker identification with structured variational inference for enhanced dementia diagnosis and staging. VMoGE employs a multi-granularity transformer to extract multi-scale temporal patterns across four frequency bands, followed by a variational graph convolutional encoder using Gaussian Markov Random Field priors. Through structured variational inference and adaptive gating, VMoGE links neural specialization to physiologically meaningful EEG frequency bands. Evaluated on two diverse datasets for both subtype classification and severity staging, VMoGE achieves superior performance with AUC improvements of +4% to +10% over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, VMoGE provides interpretable insights through expert weights that correlate with clinical indicators and spatial patterns aligned with neuropathological signatures, facilitating EEG biomarker discovery for comprehensive dementia diagnosis and monitoring.