Uncover Governing Law of Pathology Propagation Mechanism Through AMean-Field Game

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is marked by cognitive decline along with the widespread of tau aggregates across the brain cortex. Due to the challenges of imaging pathology spreading flows in vivo, however, quantitative analysis on the cortical pathways of tau propagation and its interaction with the cascade of amyloid-beta (Aβ) plaques lags behind the experimental insights of underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. To address this challenge, we present a physics-informed neural network, empowered by mean-field theory, to uncover the biologically meaningful spreading pathways of tau aggregates between two longitudinal snapshots. Following the notion of'prion-like' mechanism in AD, we first formulate the dynamics of tau propagation as a mean-field game (MFG), where the spread of tau aggregate at each location (aka.