University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering
Health Care Engineering Systems Center

Ravi Iyer, Ph.D.

Ravi Iyer, Ph.D.
Ravi Iyer, Ph.D.
George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Title: Predicting Cognitive Decline and Recovery in Neuro-Degenerative Diseases: A Case Study of Alzheimer’s

Abstract: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia, affecting more than 6 million Americans.  AD is a progressive disease that slowly destroys thought, memory and language skills and eventually affects basic bodily functions.  Our work models AD progression by combining differential equations (DEs) and reinforcement learning (RL) with domain knowledge. DEs provide relationships between some, but not all, factors relevant to AD. We assume that the missing relationships must satisfy general criteria about the working of the brain, for eg, maximizing cognition while minimizing the cost of supporting cognition. This allows us to extract the missing relationships by using RL to optimize an objective (reward) function that captures the above criteria. We use our model consisting of DEs (as a simulator) and the trained RL agent to predict individualized 10-year AD progression using baseline (year 0) features on synthetic and real data. The model was comparable or better at predicting 10-year cognition trajectories than state-of-the-art learning-based models. Our interpretable model demonstrated, and provided insights into," recovery/compensatory" processes that mitigate the effect of AD, even though those processes were not explicitly encoded in the model. Our framework combines DEs with RL for modelling AD progression and has broad applicability for understanding other neurological disorders.

Bio: Ravishankar K. Iyer is George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He holds joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS), the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

He leads the DEPEND Group at CSL/ECE at Illinois, with a multidisciplinary focus on systems and software that combine deep measurement driven analytics and machine learning with applications in two important domains:  i) trust (that spans resilience and the security of critical infrastructures); and ii) health and personalized medicine (that spans computational genomics and health analytics focused on neurodegenerative brain disease, pharmaco-genomics, breast cancer, skin cancer, and major depressive disorders). The Depend Group has developed a rich AI analytics framework that has been deployed on real-world applications in collaborations with industry, health providers, and government agencies including NSF, NIH, and DoD.

Iyer directs the Illinois/Mayo NSF Center for Computational Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine (CCBGM).  In his research he has had close collaborations with the Mayo Clinic, Center for Individualized Medicine (CIM) and other health institutions world-wide.