Fusing Structural and Functional Connectivities using Disentangled VAE for Detecting MCI
This work addresses the problem of improving prediction performance for cognitive diseases like MCI by fusing structural and functional brain connectivities, which is an incremental advancement in multimodal medical image analysis.
The paper tackled the challenge of effectively fusing multimodal neuroimages (fMRI and DTI) to detect abnormal brain connections in mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and the proposed HSCF model outperformed competing approaches in classification evaluation on the ADNI database.
Brain network analysis is a useful approach to studying human brain disorders because it can distinguish patients from healthy people by detecting abnormal connections. Due to the complementary information from multiple modal neuroimages, multimodal fusion technology has a lot of potential for improving prediction performance. However, effective fusion of multimodal medical images to achieve complementarity is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel hierarchical structural-functional connectivity fusing (HSCF) model is proposed to construct brain structural-functional connectivity matrices and predict abnormal brain connections based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Specifically, the prior knowledge is incorporated into the separators for disentangling each modality of information by the graph convolutional networks (GCN). And a disentangled cosine distance loss is devised to ensure the disentanglement's effectiveness. Moreover, the hierarchical representation fusion module is designed to effectively maximize the combination of relevant and effective features between modalities, which makes the generated structural-functional connectivity more robust and discriminative in the cognitive disease analysis. Results from a wide range of tests performed on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database show that the proposed model performs better than competing approaches in terms of classification evaluation. In general, the proposed HSCF model is a promising model for generating brain structural-functional connectivities and identifying abnormal brain connections as cognitive disease progresses.