Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease by joining dual attention CNN and MLP based on structural MRIs, clinical and genetic data

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible central nervous degenerative disease, while mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a precursor state of AD. Accurate early diagnosis of AD is conducive to the prevention and early intervention treatment of AD. Although some computational methods have been developed for AD diagnosis, most employ only neuroimaging, ignoring other data (e.g., genetic, clinical) that may have potential disease information. In addition, the results of some methods lack interpretability. In this work, we proposed a novel method (called DANMLP) of joining dual attention convolutional neural network (CNN) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) for computer-aided AD diagnosis by integrating multi-modality data of the structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), clinical data (i.e., demographics, neuropsychology), and APOE genetic data. Our DANMLP consists of four primary components: (1) the Patch-CNN for extracting the image characteristics from each local patch, (2) the position self-attention block for capturing the dependencies between features within a patch, (3) the channel self-attention block for capturing dependencies of inter-patch features, (4) two MLP networks for extracting the clinical features and outputting the AD classification results, respectively. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods in the 5CV test, DANMLP achieves 93% and 82.4% classification accuracy for the AD vs. MCI and MCI vs. NC tasks on the ADNI database, which is 0.2%∼15.2% and 3.4%∼26.8% higher than that of other five methods, respectively. The individualized visualization of focal areas can also help clinicians in the early diagnosis of AD. These results indicate that DANMLP can be effectively used for diagnosing AD and MCI patients.