DE-JANet: A unified network based on dual encoder and joint attention for Alzheimer’s disease classification using multi-modal data

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), which can reflect cerebral atrophy, plays an important role in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, the information provided by analyzing only the morphological changes in sMRI is relatively limited, and the assessment of the atrophy degree is subjective. Therefore, it is meaningful to combine sMRI with other clinical information to acquire complementary diagnosis information and achieve a more accurate classification of AD. Nevertheless, how to fuse these multi-modal data effectively is still challenging. In this paper, we propose DE-JANet, a unified AD classification network that integrates image data sMRI with non-image clinical data, such as age and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score, for more effective multi-modal analysis. DE-JANet consists of three key components: (1) a dual encoder module for extracting low-level features from the image and non-image data according to specific encoding regularity, (2) a joint attention module for fusing multi-modal features, and (3) a token classification module for performing AD-related classification according to the fused multi-modal features. Our DE-JANet is evaluated on the ADNI dataset, with a mean accuracy of 0.9722 and 0.9538 for AD classification and mild cognition impairment (MCI) classification, respectively, which is superior to existing methods and indicates advanced performance on AD-related diagnosis tasks.