Zhiwen Zhao

Xiaoxiao Yang, Meiliang Liu, Yunfang Xu et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that severely impairs cognitive function and quality of life. Timely intervention in AD relies heavily on early and precise diagnosis, which remains challenging due to the complex and subtle structural changes in the brain. Most existing deep learning methods focus only on a single plane of structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) and struggle to accurately capture the complex and nonlinear relationships among pathological regions of the brain, thus limiting their ability to precisely identify atrophic features. To overcome these limitations, we propose an innovative framework, MPF-KANSC, which integrates multi-plane fusion (MPF) for combining features from the coronal, sagittal, and axial planes, and a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network-guided spatial-channel attention mechanism (KANSC) to more effectively learn and represent sMRI atrophy features. Specifically, the proposed model enables parallel feature extraction from multiple anatomical planes, thus capturing more comprehensive structural information. The KANSC attention mechanism further leverages a more flexible and accurate nonlinear function approximation technique, facilitating precise identification and localization of disease-related abnormalities. Experiments on the ADNI dataset confirm that the proposed MPF-KANSC achieves superior performance in AD diagnosis. Moreover, our findings provide new evidence of right-lateralized asymmetry in subcortical structural changes during AD progression, highlighting the model's promising interpretability.

Xinyue Yang, Meiliang Liu, Yunfang Xu et al.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that predominantly affects the elderly population and currently has no cure. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), as a non-invasive imaging technique, is essential for the early diagnosis of AD. MRI inherently contains both spatial and frequency information, as raw signals are acquired in the frequency domain and reconstructed into spatial images via the Fourier transform. However, most existing AD diagnostic models extract features from a single domain, limiting their capacity to fully capture the complex neuroimaging characteristics of the disease. While some studies have combined spatial and frequency information, they are mostly confined to 2D MRI, leaving the potential of dual-domain analysis in 3D MRI unexplored. To overcome this limitation, we propose Spatio-Frequency Network (SFNet), the first end-to-end deep learning framework that simultaneously leverages spatial and frequency domain information to enhance 3D MRI-based AD diagnosis. SFNet integrates an enhanced dense convolutional network to extract local spatial features and a global frequency module to capture global frequency-domain representations. Additionally, a novel multi-scale attention module is proposed to further refine spatial feature extraction. Experiments on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate that SFNet outperforms existing baselines and reduces computational overhead in classifying cognitively normal (CN) and AD, achieving an accuracy of 95.1%.