MAGIC: Multi-scale Heterogeneity Analysis and Clustering for Brain Diseases

There is a growing amount of clinical, anatomical and functional evidence for the heterogeneous presentation of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). Elucidating distinct subtypes of diseases allows a better understanding of neuropathogenesis and enables the possibility of developing targeted treatment programs. Recent semi-supervised clustering techniques have provided a data-driven way to understand disease heterogeneity. However, existing methods do not take into account that subtypes of the disease might present themselves at different spatial scales across the brain. Here, we introduce a novel method, MAGIC, to uncover disease heterogeneity by leveraging multi-scale clustering. We first extract multi-scale patterns of structural covariance (PSCs) followed by a semi-supervised clustering with double cyclic block-wise optimization across different scales of PSCs. We validate MAGIC using simulated heterogeneous neuroanatomical data and demonstrate its clinical potential by exploring the heterogeneity of AD using T1 MRI scans of 228 cognitively normal (CN) and 191 patients. Our results indicate two main subtypes of AD with distinct atrophy patterns that consist of both fine-scale atrophy in the hippocampus as well as large-scale atrophy in cortical regions. The evidence for the heterogeneity is further corroborated by the clinical evaluation of two subtypes, which indicates that there is a subpopulation of AD patients that tend to be younger and decline faster in cognitive performance relative to the other subpopulation, which tends to be older and maintains a relatively steady decline in cognitive abilities.