MPS-FFA: A multiplane and multiscale feature fusion attention network for Alzheimer’s disease prediction with structural MRI

• It is my pleasure that if this project may give you a little inspiration. Hope you can follow it and do better works. :blush:
• The paper can be found at here

The pipeline of the MPS-FFA

Highlights

1. A multiplane and multiscale feature fusion encoder leveraging multiple parallel convolutional layers to effectively integrate features across different spatial planes and scales.
2. A novel attention mechanism that incorporates clinical assessment scores to dynamically refine the feature weights generated by the encoder.
3. A feature similarity discriminator enhancing the differentiation of features belonging to distinct classes.

Abstract

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) is a popular technique that is widely applied in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis. However, only a few structural atrophy areas in sMRI scans are highly associated with AD. The degree of atrophy in patients’ brain tissues and the distribution of lesion areas differ among patients. Therefore, a key challenge in sMRI-based AD diagnosis is identifying discriminating atrophy features. Hence, we propose a multiplane and multiscale feature-level fusion attention (MPS-FFA) model. The model has three components, (1) A feature encoder uses a multiscale feature extractor with hybrid attention layers to simultaneously capture and fuse multiple pathological features in the sagittal, coronal, and axial planes. (2) A global attention classifier combines clinical scores and two global attention layers to evaluate the feature impact scores and balance the relative contributions of different feature blocks. (3) A feature similarity discriminator minimizes the feature similarities among heterogeneous labels to enhance the ability of the network to discriminate atrophy features. The MPS-FFA model provides improved interpretability for identifying discriminating features using feature visualization. The experimental results on the baseline sMRI scans from two databases confirm the effectiveness (e.g., accuracy and generalizability) of our method in locating pathological locations. The source code is available at https://github.com/LiuFei-AHU/MPSFFA.