Multimodal cross enhanced fusion network for diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and subjective memory complaints. (May 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Leng, Yilin; Cui, Wenju; Peng, Yunsong; Yan, Caiying; Cao, Yuzhu; Yan, Zhuangzhi; Chen, Shuangqing; Jiang, Xi; Zheng, Jian
• Is Part Of: Computers in biology and medicine. Volume 157(2023)
• Publication Date: 2023-05
• Subjects: Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis -- Multiscale long-range receptive field -- Cross enhanced fusion -- Subjective memory complaints (SMC) diagnosis; Medicine -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Biology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 610.285
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2023.106788
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0010-4825

Abstract

Abstract: Deep learning methods using multimodal imagings have been proposed for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its early stages (SMC, subjective memory complaints), which may help to slow the progression of the disease through early intervention. However, current fusion methods for multimodal imagings are generally coarse and may lead to suboptimal results through the use of shared extractors or simple downscaling stitching. Another issue with diagnosing brain diseases is that they often affect multiple areas of the brain, making it important to consider potential connections throughout the brain. However, traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) may struggle with this issue due to their limited local receptive fields. To address this, many researchers have turned to transformer networks, which can provide global information about the brain but can be computationally intensive and perform poorly on small datasets. In this work, we propose a novel lightweight network called MENet that adaptively recalibrates the multiscale long-range receptive field to localize discriminative brain regions in a computationally efficient manner. Based on this, the network extracts the intensity and location responses between structural magnetic resonance imagings (sMRI) and 18-Fluoro-Deoxy-Glucose Positron Emission computed Tomography (FDG-PET) as an enhancement fusion for AD and SMC diagnosis. Our method is evaluated on the publicly available ADNI datasets and achieves 97.67% accuracy in AD diagnosis tasks and 81.63% accuracy in SMC diagnosis tasks using sMRI and FDG-PET. These results achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first deep learning research methods for SMC diagnosis with FDG-PET. Highlights: We propose a patch-based efficient Multimodal cross Enhanced fusion Network (MENet) that can localize discriminative regions and diagnose AD and SMC without prior knowledge, and it performs highly competitively. We design a efficient multiscale long-range reception module (MLR) that dynamically recalibrates the cross-dimensional feature weights guided by channel attention. The correlation and complementarity between features of sMRI and FDG-PET are emphasized to enhance the local discriminative capability on the patch-level.