[AISWorld] [iDPP at CLEF 2024] Call for Participation in the Intelligent Disease Progression Prediction (iDPP at CLEF)

[Guglielmo Faggioli]

TL;DR: The intelligent Disease Progression Prediction (iDPP at CLEF) challenge
focuses on predicting the progression of two severe neurodegenerative
diseases ALS and MS. Participants will have access to real data to test
their predictive algorithms. The report describing participant approaches
to the challenge tasks will be peer-reviewed. Accepted reports will be
published on the CEUR-WS CLEF working notes, and can be presented at CLEF
in Grenoble, France.

CHALLENGE OVERVIEW

iDPP at CLEF is an open evaluation challenge to assess the performance of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to predict the progression of
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). iDPP
stands for Intelligent Disease Progression Prediction and it is a series of
events, @organised by the BRAINTEASER project, co-located with the
Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) since 2022. This year's
edition is co-located with CLEF 2024, whose final event will be held in
Grenoble, France, from 9 to 12 September 2024.


ALS and MS are two severe neurodegenerative diseases that affect the
Central Nervous System (CNS). They are chronic diseases characterized by
progressive or alternate impairment of neurological functions (motor,
sensory, visual, cognitive). Patients undergo alternated periods in the
hospital with care at home, experiencing constant uncertainty regarding the
timing of the disease's acute phases and facing a considerable
psychological and economic burden that also involves their caregivers.


Therefore, AI algorithms, trained on both retrospective and prospective
patient data, can be of great help to both clinicians and patients in
providing indications about the estimated progression of such diseases to
support therapeutic decisions, to contribute to better caregiving, and to
reduce psychological burden and uncertainty.


To be effective and accurate such AI algorithms need, at the same time, to
be trained on real patient data and to be tested on previously unseen
patient data, in order to evaluate and ensure their capacity of reliably
operate in real conditions.

THE TASKS

iDPP at CLEF is organized into three different tasks, the first two focusing
on ALS and the third focusing on MS.

For Tasks 1 and 2, which focus on ALS participants are given prospective
patient data collected over an average of nine months via a dedicated app
developed by the BRAINTEASER project and sensor data collected from the
sensors of a fitness smartwatch in the context of clinical trials in Turin,
Pavia, Lisbon, and Madrid, fully anonymized.

Given the severity of the disease at time n, the objective of tasks 1 and 2
is to predict what will be the severity of the disease at time n+1, based
on the measurements of a set of physiological parameters collected using a
set of sensors. The severity is measured according to the ALSFRS-R and is
either assessed by the clinician or self-assessed by the patient.

For Task 3, which focuses on MS, participants are given a retrospective
dataset containing roughly 1.5 years of visits and environmental data. This
dataset comes from two clinical institutions, one in Pavia, Italy, and the
other in Turin, Italy, and it contains data about real patients, fully
anonymized.

In this case, the objective is to predict the week of the first relapse
after the first visit, given the status of the patient at the first visit
and a set of environmental data.

Training data are already available.

PARTICIPATING

To participate in iDPP  CLEF 2024, groups need to register at the following
link: https://clef2024-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/

IMPORTANT DATES

   -

   Registration closes: April 22, 2024
   -

   Test data release: April 29, 2024
   -

   Runs submission deadline: May 6, 2024
   -

   Evaluation results out: May 17, 2024
   -

   Participant and position paper submission deadline: May 31, 2024
   -

   Notification of acceptance for participant and position papers: June 24,
   2024
   -

   Camera-ready participant papers submission: July 8, 2024
   -

   iDPP  CLEF Workshop: September 9-12, 2024 during the CLEF Conference in
   Grenoble, France



PUBLICATIONS

The participants will be required to submit a paper describing their
approach (10-20 pages in length, excluding references). Participant reports
will be peer-reviewed and accepted reports will be published in the CLEF
2024 Working Notes at CEUR-WS, indexed in DBLP and Scopus.