Overview of iDPP@CLEF 2024: The Intelligent Disease Progression Prediction Challenge

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) are neurodegenerative diseases characterized by progressive or fluctuating impairments in motor, sensory, visual, and cognitive functions. Patients with these diseases endure significant physical, psychological, and economic burdens due to hospitalizations and home care while grappling with uncertainty about their conditions. AI tools hold promise for aiding patients and clinicians by identifying the need for intervention and suggesting personalized therapies throughout disease progression. The objective of iDPP@CLEF is to develop AI-based approaches to describe the progression of these diseases. The ultimate goal is to enable patient stratification and predict disease progression, thereby assisting clinicians in providing timely care. iDPP@CLEF 2024 continues the work of the previous editions, iDPP@CLEF 2022 and 2023. The 2022 edition focused on predicting ALS progression and utilizing explainable AI. The 2023 edition expanded on this by including environmental data and introduced a new task for predicting MS progression. This edition extends the MS dataset with environmental data and introduces two new ALS tasks aimed at predicting disease progression using data from wearable devices. This marks the first iDPP edition to utilize prospective data directly collected from patients involved in the BRAINTEASER project.