Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis via multimodal feature fusion

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder in the elderly. Early diagnosis of AD plays a vital role in slowing down the progress of AD because there is no effective drug to treat the disease. Some deep learning models have recently been presented for AD diagnosis and have more satisfactory performance than classic machine learning methods. Nevertheless, most of the existing computer-aided diagnostic models used neuroimaging features for diagnosis, ignoring patients’ clinical and biological information. This makes the AD diagnosis inaccurate. In this study, we propose a novel multimodal feature transformation and fusion model for AD diagnosis. The feature transformation aims to avoid the difference in feature dimensions between different modal data and further mine the significant features for AD diagnosis. A geometric algebra-based feature extension method is proposed to obtain different levels of high-dimensional features from patients’ clinical and personal biological data. Then, an influence degree-based feature filtration algorithm is proposed to filtrate those features that have no apparent guiding significance for AD diagnosis. Finally, an ANN (Artificial Neural Network)-based framework is designed to fuse transformed features with neuroimaging features extracted by CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) for AD diagnosis. The more in-depth feature mining of patients’ clinical information and biological information can significantly improve the performance of computer-aided AD diagnosis. The experiments are obtained on the ADNI dataset. Our proposed model can converge faster and achieves 96.2% accuracy in AD diagnostic task and 87.4% accuracy in MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment) diagnostic task. Compared with other methods, our proposed approach has an excellent performance in AD diagnosis and surpasses SOTA (state-of-the-art) methods. Therefore, our model can provide more reasonable suggestions for clinicians to diagnose and treat disease.