arXiv:2507.09996cs.CVq-bio.NC2025-07被引 2

用视觉变压器分析多壳扩散MRI,提升阿尔茨海默病早期诊断精度。

Leveraging Swin Transformer for enhanced diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease using multi-shell diffusion MRI

  • 基于Swin Transformer构建分类框架,融合DTI与NODDI特征
  • 对健康人与痴呆患者区分达95.2%准确率,淀粉样蛋白检测达77.2%
  • 可解释性分析定位海马等关键脑区,适合临床辅助诊断研究

本研究旨在利用多壳扩散MRI(dMRI)的微结构信息,通过基于视觉变换器的深度学习框架,支持阿尔茨海默病的早期诊断及淀粉样蛋白积聚的检测。提出一种分类流程,采用分层视觉变换器模型Swin Transformer处理多壳dMRI数据,从DTI和NODDI中提取关键指标并投影至二维平面,以实现ImageNet预训练模型的迁移学习。为在标注数据有限的神经影像场景下高效适应变换器,引入低秩适配(Low-Rank Adaptation)。在认知正常、轻度认知障碍和阿尔茨海默病痴呆的分组预测,以及淀粉样状态分类任务上进行评估。结果表明,该框架在多壳dMRI特征基础上表现优异:使用NODDI指标区分健康人与痴呆患者时,平衡准确率达95.2%;在区分淀粉样阳性(轻度认知障碍/痴呆)与阴性(健康人)时达到77.2%;在认知正常人群中识别淀粉样阳性个体的准确率为67.9%。基于Grad-CAM的可解释性分析揭示了海马旁回和海马等临床相关脑区是模型决策的关键贡献区域。研究证明,扩散MRI与变换器架构结合在阿尔茨海默病及淀粉样病理的早期检测中具有潜力,适用于数据受限的生物医学诊断场景。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Objective: This study aims to support early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and detection of amyloid accumulation by leveraging the microstructural information available in multi-shell diffusion MRI (dMRI) data, using a vision transformer-based deep learning framework. Methods: We present a classification pipeline that employs the Swin Transformer, a hierarchical vision transformer model, on multi-shell dMRI data for the classification of Alzheimer's disease and amyloid presence. Key metrics from DTI and NODDI were extracted and projected onto 2D planes to enable transfer learning with ImageNet-pretrained models. To efficiently adapt the transformer to limited labeled neuroimaging data, we integrated Low-Rank Adaptation. We assessed the framework on diagnostic group prediction (cognitively normal, mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease dementia) and amyloid status classification. Results: The framework achieved competitive classification results within the scope of multi-shell dMRI-based features, with the best balanced accuracy of 95.2% for distinguishing cognitively normal individuals from those with Alzheimer's disease dementia using NODDI metrics. For amyloid detection, it reached 77.2% balanced accuracy in distinguishing amyloid-positive mild cognitive impairment/Alzheimer's disease dementia subjects from amyloid-negative cognitively normal subjects, and 67.9% for identifying amyloid-positive individuals among cognitively normal subjects. Grad-CAM-based explainability analysis identified clinically relevant brain regions, including the parahippocampal gyrus and hippocampus, as key contributors to model predictions. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the promise of diffusion MRI and transformer-based architectures for early detection of Alzheimer's disease and amyloid pathology, supporting biomarker-driven diagnostics in data-limited biomedical settings.

阿尔茨海默病扩散MRI视觉变换器可解释性

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