With ageing populations around the world, there is a rapid rise in the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), the two most common types of neurodegenerative disorders. There is an urgent need to find new ways of aiding early diagnosis of these conditions. Multimodal learning of clinically accessible data is a relatively new approach that holds great potential to support early precise diagnosis. This scoping review follows the PRSIMA guidelines and we analysed 46 papers, comprising 11,750 participants, 3569 with AD, 978 with PD, and 2482 healthy controls; the recency of this topic was highlighted by nearly all papers being published in the last 5 years. It highlights the effectiveness of combining different types of data, such as brain scans, cognitive scores, speech and language, gait, hand and eye movements, and genetic assessments for the early detection of AD and PD. The review also outlines the AI methods and the model used in each study, which includes feature extraction, feature selection, feature fusion, and using multi-source discriminative features for classification. The review identifies knowledge gaps around the need to validate findings and address limitations such as small sample sizes. Applying multimodal learning of clinically accessible tests holds strong potential to aid the development of low-cost, reliable, and non-invasive methods for early detection of AD and PD.

The widespread use of web services in forming complex online applications requires service composition to cope with highly dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Traditional centralized service composition techniques are not sufficient to address the needs of applications in decentralized environments. In this paper, a stigmergic-based approach is proposed to model the decentralized service interactions and handle service composition in highly dynamic open environments. In the proposed approach, web services and resources are modeled as multiple agents. Stigmergic-based self-organization mechanisms among agents are deployed to facilitate adapting service composition. In addition, to overcome the limitations of traditional QoS-based approaches, trust measurements are deployed as a criterion for service selection. To improve the performance of the proposed stigmergic-based approach under dynamic scale-free environments, we investigate the hybridization with local search operators to consolidate adaptation, and diversity schemes are introduced to facilitate continual service adaptation. Extensive experiments show the efficiency of the proposed approach in dealing with incomplete information and dynamic factors in composing and adapting web services in open environments. The experiment results also show that the proposed approach achieves a better performance than other traditional approaches.