用动态门控融合纵向脑影像,提升阿尔茨海默病预测精度。
Adaptive Temporal Gating of Longitudinal Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Alzheimer's Prediction

- 设计自适应时间门控模块,学习个体化时间权重融合多时点影像。
- 在ADNI数据集上三 年转化预测准确率超越纯结构MRI方法,接近多模态水平。
- 仅需少量数据即可达到基线性能,适合小样本临床研究。
预测轻度认知障碍(MCI)向阿尔茨海默病(AD)转化对早期干预至关重要。现有深度学习模型多依赖横断面结构磁共振成像(MRI),忽视了患者特异性解剖轨迹的预后价值。本文提出时序自适应融合网络(TAF-Net),一种混合卷积-注意力架构,用于建模配对的纵向3D MRI扫描。核心为时序融合模块,由自适应时间门控驱动,学习个体化权重以融合三种时空表征:显式结构变化、区域间时序交叉注意力以及双侧特征拼接。在阿尔茨海默病神经影像倡议(ADNI)队列上评估三年内MCI转AD预测任务,TAF-Net在仅使用结构MRI的情况下,表现优于所有对比方法,显著超越最强基线,并接近需要PET、脑脊液或遗传数据的多模态方法。该架构表现出优异的数据效率,仅用少量训练数据即达到基线性能。消融实验表明,纵向融合可提升判别能力,同时使预测方差降低48%。可解释性分析显示空间注意力与已知的AD病理区域(内侧颞叶和脑室)一致,且门控机制优先关注体积变化,其强度与转化风险呈强正相关。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Predicting conversion from Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is critical for early intervention. Current deep learning paradigms predominantly rely on cross-sectional structural MRI, neglecting prognostic value in patient-specific anatomical trajectories. We introduce the Temporal Adaptive Fusion Network (TAF-Net), a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture that models paired longitudinal 3D MRI scans. Central to TAF-Net is a Temporal Fusion Module governed by an Adaptive Temporal Gate, which learns patient-specific weightings to synthesize three spatiotemporal representations: explicit structural change, region-to-region temporal cross-attention, and bilateral feature concatenation. Evaluated on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative cohort for three-year MCI-to-AD conversion prediction, TAF-Net achieved the highest discriminative performance among all evaluated methods using only structural MRI, significantly outperforming the strongest baseline and approaching multimodal methods requiring PET, CSF, or genetic data. The architecture exhibited exceptional data efficiency, matching baseline performance with a fraction of training data. Ablation studies demonstrate that longitudinal fusion improves discrimination while reducing predictive variance by 48% compared to single-timepoint evaluation. Interpretability analyses reveal spatial attention aligned with established AD pathology in the medial temporal lobe and ventricles, while the gating mechanism prioritizes explicit volumetric change with strong positive correlation to conversion risk.
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