Disentangle First, Then Distill: A Unified Framework for Missing Modality Imputation and Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

Multi-modality medical data provide complementary information, and hence have been widely explored for computer-aided AD diagnosis. However, the research is hindered by the unavoidable missing-data problem, i.e., one data modality was not acquired on some subjects due to various reasons. Although the missing data can be imputed using generative models, the imputation process may introduce unrealistic information to the classification process, leading to poor performance. In this paper, we propose the Disentangle First, Then Distill (DFTD) framework for AD diagnosis using incomplete multi-modality medical images. First, we design a region-aware disentanglement module to disentangle each image into inter-modality relevant representation and intra-modality specific representation with emphasis on disease-related regions. To progressively integrate multi-modality knowledge, we then construct an imputation-induced distillation module, in which a lateral inter-modality transition unit is created to impute representation of the missing modality. The proposed DFTD framework has been evaluated against six existing methods on an ADNI dataset with 1248 subjects. The results show that our method has superior performance in both AD-CN classification and MCI-to-AD prediction tasks, substantially over-performing all competing methods.