Trans-ResNet: Integrating Transformers and CNNs for Alzheimer’s disease classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance for brain disease classification from MRI data. However, CNNs lack the ability to capture global dependencies. The recently proposed architecture called Transformer uses attention mechanisms to match or even outperform CNNs on various vision tasks. Transformer's performance is dependent on access to large training datasets, but sample sizes for most brain MRI datasets are relatively small. To overcome this limitation, we propose Trans-ResNet, a novel architecture which integrates the advantages of both CNNs and Transformers. In addition, we pre-trained our Trans-ResNet on a large-scale dataset on the task of brain age estimation for higher performance. Using three neuroimaging cohorts (UK Biobank, AIBL, ADNI), we demonstrated that our Trans-ResNet achieved higher classification accuracy on Alzheimer disease prediction compared to other state-of-the-art CNN-based methods.