Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) is widely used for the brain neurological disease diagnosis, which could reflect the variations of brain. However, due to the local brain atrophy, only a few regions in sMRI scans have obvious structural changes, which are highly correlative with pathological features. Hence, the key challenge of sMRI-based brain disease diagnosis is to enhance the identification of discriminative features. To address this issue, we propose a dual attention multi-instance deep learning network (DA-MIDL) for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal stage mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Specifically, DA-MIDL consists of three primary components: 1) the Patch-Nets with spatial attention blocks for extracting discriminative features within each sMRI patch whilst enhancing the features of abnormally changed micro-structures in the cerebrum, 2) an attention multi-instance learning (MIL) pooling operation for balancing the relative contribution of each patch and yield a global different weighted representation for the whole brain structure, and 3) an attention-aware global classifier for further learning the integral features and making the AD-related classification decisions. Our proposed DA-MIDL model is evaluated on the baseline sMRI scans of 1689 subjects from two independent datasets (i.e., ADNI and AIBL). The experimental results show that our DA-MIDL model can identify discriminative pathological locations and achieve better classification performance in terms of accuracy and generalizability, compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by a wide range of symptoms. Identifying biomarkers for accurate diagnosis is crucial for early intervention of ASD. While multi-site data increase sample size and statistical power, they suffer from inter-site heterogeneity. To address this issue, we propose a multi-site adaption framework via low-rank representation decomposition (maLRR) for ASD identification based on functional MRI (fMRI). The main idea is to determine a common low-rank representation for data from the multiple sites, aiming to reduce differences in data distributions. Treating one site as a target domain and the remaining sites as source domains, data from these domains are transformed (i.e., adapted) to a common space using low-rank representation. To reduce data heterogeneity between the target and source domains, data from the source domains are linearly represented in the common space by those from the target domain. We evaluated the proposed method on both synthetic and real multi-site fMRI data for ASD identification. The results suggest that our method yields superior performance over several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.

Brain network provides essential insights in diagnosing many brain disorders. Integrative analysis of multiple types of connectivity, e.g, functional connectivity (FC) and structural connectivity (SC), can take advantage of their complementary information and therefore may help to identify patients. However, traditional brain network methods usually focus on either FC or SC for describing node interactions and only consider the interaction between paired network nodes. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an Attention-Diffusion-Bilinear Neural Network (ADB-NN) framework for brain network analysis, which is trained in an end-to-end manner. The proposed network seamlessly couples FC and SC to learn wider node interactions and generates a joint representation of FC and SC for diagnosis. Specifically, a brain network (graph) is first defined, where each node corresponding to a brain region is governed by the features of brain activities (i.e., FC) extracted from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and the presence of edges is determined by neural fiber physical connections (i.e., SC) extracted from Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). Based on this graph, we train two Attention-Diffusion-Bilinear (ADB) modules jointly. In each module, an attention model is utilized to automatically learn the strength of node interactions. This information further guides a diffusion process that generates new node representations by considering the influence from other nodes as well. After that, the second-order statistics of these node representations are extracted by bilinear pooling to form connectivity-based features for disease prediction. The two ADB modules correspond to the one-step and two-step diffusion, respectively. Experiments on a real epilepsy dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed method.

Multi-modal fusion has become an important data analysis technology in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis, which is committed to effectively extract and utilize complementary information among different modalities. However, most of the existing fusion methods focus on pursuing common feature representation by transformation, and ignore discriminative structural information among samples. In addition, most fusion methods use high-order feature extraction, such as deep neural network, by which it is difficult to identify biomarkers. In this paper, we propose a novel method named deep multi-modal discriminative and interpretability network (DMDIN), which aligns samples in a discriminative common space and provides a new approach to identify significant brain regions (ROIs) in AD diagnosis. Specifically, we reconstruct each modality with a hierarchical representation through multilayer perceptron (MLP), and take advantage of the shared self-expression coefficients constrained by diagonal blocks to embed the structural information of inter-class and the intra-class. Further, the generalized canonical correlation analysis (GCCA) is adopted as a correlation constraint to generate a discriminative common space, in which samples of the same category gather while samples of different categories stay away. Finally, in order to enhance the interpretability of the deep learning model, we utilize knowledge distillation to reproduce coordinated representations and capture influence of brain regions in AD classification. Experiments show that the proposed method performs better than several state-of-the-art methods in AD diagnosis.

Histopathological image classification constitutes a pivotal task in computer-aided diagnostics. The precise identification and categorization of histopathological images are of paramount significance for early disease detection and treatment. In the diagnostic process of pathologists, a multi-tiered approach is typically employed to assess abnormalities in cell regions at different magnifications. However, feature extraction is often performed at a single granularity, overlooking the multi-granular characteristics of cells. To address this issue, we propose the Fuzzy-guided Multi-granularity Deep Neural Network (FMDNN). Inspired by the multi-granular diagnostic approach of pathologists, we perform feature extraction on cell structures at coarse, medium, and fine granularity, enabling the model to fully harness the information in histopathological images. We incorporate the theory of fuzzy logic to address the challenge of redundant key information arising during multi-granular feature extraction. Cell features are described from different perspectives using multiple fuzzy membership functions, which are fused to create universal fuzzy features. A fuzzy-guided cross-attention module guides universal fuzzy features toward multi-granular features. We propagate these features through an encoder to all patch tokens, aiming to achieve enhanced classification accuracy and robustness. In experiments on multiple public datasets, our model exhibits a significant improvement in accuracy over commonly used classification methods for histopathological image classification and shows commendable interpretability. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/Choutyear/FMDNN .

The fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) has been widely used as potential clinical biomarkers for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging based schizophrenia diagnosis. However, previous studies usually measure the fALFF with specific bands from 0.01-0.08 Hz, which cannot fully delineate the complex variations of spontaneous fluctuations in the resting-state brain. As we konow, fALFF data is intrinsically constrained by the brain structure, but most of the traditional methods have not consider it in feature selection. For addressing these problems, we propose a model to classify schizophrenia in multi-frequency bands with tree-guided group sparse learning. In detail, we first acquire the fALFF data in multi-frequency bands (i.e., slow-5:0.01-0.027 Hz, slow-4:0.027-0.073 Hz, slow-3:0.073-0.198 Hz and slow-2:0.198-0.25 Hz). Then, we divide the whole brain into different candidate patches, and select those significant patches related to schizophrenia using random forest-based importancescore. Moreover, we use tree-structured sparse learning method for feature selection with above patches spatial constraint. Finally, considering biomarkers from multi-frequency bands can reflect complementary information among multiple frequency bands, we adopt the multi-kernel learning (MKL) method to combine features of multi-frequency bands for classification. Our experimental results show that these biomarkers from multi-frequency bands can achieve a classification accuracy of 91.1% on 17 schizophrenia patients and 17 healthy controls, further demonstrating the multi-frequency bands analysis can better account for classification of schizophrenia.