As the global burden of Alzheimer's disease (AD) continues to grow, early and accurate detection has become increasingly critical, especially in regions with limited access to advanced diagnostic tools. We propose BRAINS (Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Intelligence for Neurodegeneration Screening) to address this challenge. This novel system harnesses the powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Alzheimer's detection and monitoring. BRAINS features a dual-module architecture: a cognitive diagnostic module and a case-retrieval module. The Diagnostic Module utilizes LLMs fine-tuned on cognitive and neuroimaging datasets -- including MMSE, CDR scores, and brain volume metrics -- to perform structured assessments of Alzheimer's risk. Meanwhile, the Case Retrieval Module encodes patient profiles into latent representations and retrieves similar cases from a curated knowledge base. These auxiliary cases are fused with the input profile via a Case Fusion Layer to enhance contextual understanding. The combined representation is then processed with clinical prompts for inference. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate BRAINS effectiveness in classifying disease severity and identifying early signs of cognitive decline. This system not only shows strong potential as an assistive tool for scalable, explainable, and early-stage Alzheimer's disease detection, but also offers hope for future applications in the field.
School of Information Technology（信息技术学院）；University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）
Alzheimer's disease is a degenerative brain disease. Being the primary cause of Dementia in adults and progressively destroys brain memory. Though Alzheimer's disease does not have a cure currently, diagnosing it at an earlier stage will help reduce the severity of the disease. Thus, early diagnosis of Alzheimer's could help to reduce or stop the disease from progressing. In this paper, we proposed a deep convolutional neural network-based model for learning model using to determine the stage of Dementia in adults based on the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images to detect the early onset o…
University of Macau（澳门大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Brain network analysis is essential for diagnosing and intervention for Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, previous research relied primarily on specific time-consuming and subjective toolkits. Only few tools can obtain the structural brain networks from brain diffusion tensor images (DTI). In this paper, we propose a diffusion based end-to-end brain network generative model Brain Diffuser that directly shapes the structural brain networks from DTI. Compared to existing toolkits, Brain Diffuser exploits more structural connectivity features and disease-related information by analyzing disparit…
Alzheimer's Disease destroys brain cells causing people to lose their memory, mental functions and ability to continue daily activities. It is a severe neurological brain disorder which is not curable, but earlier detection of Alzheimer's Disease can help for proper treatment and to prevent brain tissue damage. Detection and classification of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is challenging because sometimes the signs that distinguish Alzheimer's Disease MRI data can be found in normal healthy brain MRI data of older people. Moreover, there are relatively small amount of dataset available to train the …
Lehigh University（利哈伊大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；NYU Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院）
Normative modeling is an emerging and promising approach to effectively study disorder heterogeneity in individual participants. In this study, we propose a novel normative modeling method by combining conditional variational autoencoder with adversarial learning (ACVAE) to identify brain dysfunction in Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Specifically, we first train a conditional VAE on the healthy control (HC) group to create a normative model conditioned on covariates like age, gender and intracranial volume. Then we incorporate an adversarial training process to construct a discriminative feature sp…
Univ. Bordeaux（波尔多大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bordeaux INP（波尔多国立高等物理、数学与信息技术学院）；Universitat Politècnia de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）
Alzheimer's disease is the most common dementia leading to an irreversible neurodegenerative process. To date, subject revealed advanced brain structural alterations when the diagnosis is established. Therefore, an earlier diagnosis of this dementia is crucial although it is a challenging task. Recently, many studies have proposed biomarkers to perform early detection of Alzheimer's disease. Some of them have proposed methods based on inter-subject similarity while other approaches have investigated framework using intra-subject variability. In this work, we propose a novel framework combining…
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund（多特蒙德应用科学与艺术大学）；University Hospital Essen（埃森大学医院）
Purpose: Hard-to-interpret Black-box Machine Learning (ML) were often used for early Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection. Methods: To interpret eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) black-box models a workflow based on Shapley values was developed. All models were trained on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset and evaluated for an independent ADNI test set, as well as the external Australian Imaging and Lifestyle flagship study of Ageing (AIBL), and Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) datasets. Shapley valu…
McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院麦戈文脑研究所）；Complutense University of Madrid（马德里康普顿斯大学）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）
Characterizing the subtle changes of functional brain networks associated with the pathological cascade of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is important for early diagnosis and prediction of disease progression prior to clinical symptoms. We developed a new deep learning method, termed multiple graph Gaussian embedding model (MG2G), which can learn highly informative network features by mapping high-dimensional resting-state brain networks into a low-dimensional latent space. These latent distribution-based embeddings enable a quantitative characterization of subtle and heterogeneous brain connectivit…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Central South University（中南大学）
Alzheimer's disease is characterized by alterations of the brain's structural and functional connectivity during its progressive degenerative processes. Existing auxiliary diagnostic methods have accomplished the classification task, but few of them can accurately evaluate the changing characteristics of brain connectivity. In this work, a prior guided adversarial representation learning and hypergraph perceptual network (PGARL-HPN) is proposed to predict abnormal brain connections using triple-modality medical images. Concretely, a prior distribution from the anatomical knowledge is estimated…
In recent days, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated impressive performance in medical image analysis. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of why and how the Convolutional Neural Network performs so well for image analysis task. How CNN analyzes an image and discriminates among samples of different classes are usually considered as non-transparent. As a result, it becomes difficult to apply CNN based approaches in clinical procedures and automated disease diagnosis systems. In this paper, we consider this issue and work on visualizing and understanding the decision…
Lehigh University（里海大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Identification of brain regions related to the specific neurological disorders are of great importance for biomarker and diagnostic studies. In this paper, we propose an interpretable Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) framework for the identification and classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) using multi-modality brain imaging data. Specifically, we extended the Gradient Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) technique to quantify the most discriminative features identified by GCN from brain connectivity patterns. We then utilized them to find signature regions of interest (ROIs) by detecting…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Cross-modal fusion of different types of neuroimaging data has shown great promise for predicting the progression of Alzheimer's Disease(AD). However, most existing methods applied in neuroimaging can not efficiently fuse the functional and structural information from multi-modal neuroimages. In this work, a novel cross-modal transformer generative adversarial network(CT-GAN) is proposed to fuse functional information contained in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and structural information contained in Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). The developed bi-attention mech…
Technische Hochschule Aschaffenburg（阿沙芬堡应用技术大学）；Universidade de São Paulo (USP)（圣保罗大学）
Mental disorders are among the leading causes of disability worldwide. The first step in treating these conditions is to obtain an accurate diagnosis, but the absence of established clinical tests makes this task challenging. Machine learning algorithms can provide a possible solution to this problem, as we describe in this work. We present a method for the automatic diagnosis of mental disorders based on the matrix of connections obtained from EEG time series and deep learning. We show that our approach can classify patients with Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia with a high level of accu…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics（瑞士生物信息学研究所）
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with local (e.g. brain tissue atrophy) and global brain changes (loss of cerebral connectivity), which can be detected by high-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging. Conventionally, these changes and their relation to AD are investigated independently. Here, we introduce a novel, highly-scalable approach that simultaneously captures $\textit{local}$ and $\textit{global}$ changes in the diseased brain. It is based on a neural network architecture that combines patch-based, high-resolution 3D-CNNs with global topological features, evaluating mult…
National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；MOST Joint Research Center for AI Technology and All Vista Healthcare（科技部人工智能技术与全视野医疗联合研究中心）；National Health Research Institutes（国家卫生研究院）
The ability to accurately detect onset of dementia is important in the treatment of the disease. Clinically, the diagnosis of Alzheimer Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients are based on an integrated assessment of psychological tests and brain imaging such as positron emission tomography (PET) and anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In this work using two different datasets, we propose a behavior score-embedded encoder network (BSEN) that integrates regularly adminstrated psychological tests information into the encoding procedure of representing subject's resting…
Lakehead University（湖首大学）；University of Calgary（卡尔加里大学）
Objective: This paper presents an Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection method based on learning structural similarity between Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) and representing this similarity as a graph. Methods: We construct the similarity graph using embedded features of the input image (i.e., Non-Demented (ND), Very Mild Demented (VMD), Mild Demented (MD), and Moderated Demented (MDTD)). We experiment and compare different dimension-reduction and clustering algorithms to construct the best similarity graph to capture the similarity between the same class images using the cosine distance as a …
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of dementia. Traditional methods cannot achieve efficient and accurate diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we introduce a novel method based on dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) that can effectively capture changes in the brain. We compare and combine four different types of features including amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF), regional homogeneity (ReHo), dFC and the adjacency matrix of different brain structures between subjects. We use graph convolution network (GCN) which consider the similarity of brain structure between pati…
Bridging Brain Connectomes and Clinical Reports for Early Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis
The University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）；Indiana University Indianapolis（印第安纳大学印第安纳波利斯分校）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；The University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）
Northwestern University（西北大学）；Northwestern Memorial Hospital（西北纪念医院）
We propose a mesh-based technique to aid in the classification of Alzheimer's disease dementia (ADD) using mesh representations of the cortex and subcortical structures. Deep learning methods for classification tasks that utilize structural neuroimaging often require extensive learning parameters to optimize. Frequently, these approaches for automated medical diagnosis also lack visual interpretability for areas in the brain involved in making a diagnosis. This work: (a) analyzes brain shape using surface information of the cortex and subcortical structures, (b) proposes a residual learning fr…
Neuroimaging biomarkers that distinguish between typical brain aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are valuable for determining how much each contributes to cognitive decline. Machine learning models can derive multi-variate brain change patterns related to the two processes, including the SPARE-AD (Spatial Patterns of Atrophy for Recognition of Alzheimer's Disease) and SPARE-BA (of Brain Aging) investigated herein. However, substantial overlap between brain regions affected in the two processes confounds measuring them independently. We present a methodology toward disentangling the two. T1-we…
Multi-Scale Graph Theoretical Analysis of Resting-State fMRI for Classification of Alzheimer's Disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment, and Healthy Controls
University of Bojnord（博季努尔德大学）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）
We propose a novel framework for Alzheimer's disease (AD) detection using brain MRIs. The framework starts with a data augmentation method called Brain-Aware Replacements (BAR), which leverages a standard brain parcellation to replace medically-relevant 3D brain regions in an anchor MRI from a randomly picked MRI to create synthetic samples. Ground truth "hard" labels are also linearly mixed depending on the replacement ratio in order to create "soft" labels. BAR produces a great variety of realistic-looking synthetic MRIs with higher local variability compared to other mix-based methods, such…
3D Brain MRI Classification for Alzheimer Diagnosis Using CNN with Data Augmentation
Vo Thien Nhan Institute of Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HUTECH), Vietnam（越南胡志明市技术大学（HUTECH）工程学院）；Ho Bac Nam Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM), Vietnam（越南胡志明市技术大学（HCMUT）计算机科学与工程学院，越南胡志明市国家大学（VNU-HCM））
University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）；University of Auckland（奥克兰大学）
Early diagnosis, playing an important role in preventing progress and treating the Alzheimer's disease (AD), is based on classification of features extracted from brain images. The features have to accurately capture main AD-related variations of anatomical brain structures, such as, e.g., ventricles size, hippocampus shape, cortical thickness, and brain volume. This paper proposes to predict the AD with a deep 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN), which can learn generic features capturing AD biomarkers and adapt to different domain datasets. The 3D-CNN is built upon a 3D convolutional au…
Early diagnosis, playing an important role in preventing progress and treating the Alzheimer\{'}s disease (AD), is based on classification of features extracted from brain images. The features have to accurately capture main AD-related variations of anatomical brain structures, such as, e.g., ventricles size, hippocampus shape, cortical thickness, and brain volume. This paper proposed to predict the AD with a deep 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN), which can learn generic features capturing AD biomarkers and adapt to different domain datasets. The 3D-CNN is built upon a 3D convolutional…
Texas Tech Neuroimaging Institute, Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学神经影像研究所，德克萨斯理工大学）
Accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is both challenging and time consuming. With a systematic approach for early detection and diagnosis of AD, steps can be taken towards the treatment and prevention of the disease. This study explores the practical application of deep learning models for diagnosis of AD. Due to computational complexity, large training times and limited availability of labelled dataset, a 3D full brain CNN (convolutional neural network) is not commonly used, and researchers often prefer 2D CNN variants. In this study, full brain 3D version of well-known 2D CNNs were…
Self-Supervised Pretext Tasks for Alzheimer's Disease Classification using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks on Large-Scale Synthetic Neuroimaging Dataset
Variational Mixture of Graph Neural Experts for Alzheimer's Disease Recognition across Frequency Bands in EEG Brain Networks
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Rutgers University（鲁特大学工业与系统工程系）；Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学精神病学与行为科学系）；Institute of Brain Science, College of Medicine, National Yang-Ming Chiao Tung University（国家阳明交通大学医学院脑科学研究所）
Faculty of Science, Northern Border University（北部边境大学理学院）；SEU Saudi Electronic University（沙特电子大学）
Alzheimer's disease is a neurogenerative disease that alters memories, cognitive functions leading to death. Early diagnosis of the disease, by detection of the preliminary stage, called Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), remains a challenging issue. In this respect, we introduce, in this paper, a powerful classification architecture that implements the pre-trained network AlexNet to automatically extract the most prominent features from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images in order to detect the Alzheimer's disease at the MCI stage. The proposed method is evaluated using a big database from …
School of Engineering, Lakehead University（湖首大学工程学院）
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a severe brain disorder, destroying memories and brain functions. AD causes chronically, progressively, and irreversibly cognitive declination and brain damages. The reliable and effective evaluation of early dementia has become essential research with medical imaging technologies and computer-aided algorithms. This trend has moved to modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies motivated by deeplearning success in image classification and natural language processing. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of the latest research involving deep-lear…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Center for Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science（神经影像与数据科学转化研究中心）；Mila（米拉）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
Introspection of deep supervised predictive models trained on functional and structural brain imaging may uncover novel markers of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, supervised training is prone to learning from spurious features (shortcut learning) impairing its value in the discovery process. Deep unsupervised and, recently, contrastive self-supervised approaches, not biased to classification, are better candidates for the task. Their multimodal options specifically offer additional regularization via modality interactions. In this paper, we introduce a way to exhaustively consider multimoda…
The Mind Research Network（心智研究网络）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Shanxi University（山西大学）
Arguably, unsupervised learning plays a crucial role in the majority of algorithms for processing brain imaging. A recently introduced unsupervised approach Deep InfoMax (DIM) is a promising tool for exploring brain structure in a flexible non-linear way. In this paper, we investigate the use of variants of DIM in a setting of progression to Alzheimer's disease in comparison with supervised AlexNet and ResNet inspired convolutional neural networks. As a benchmark, we use a classification task between four groups: patients with stable, and progressive mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with Alzhe…
An Attention-Based Framework for Alzheimers Disease Classification Using Resting-State fMRI
School of Medical Science and Technology（医学科学与技术学院）；Dr B C Roy Multi Speciality Medical Research Centre（B C Roy多专科医学研究中心）；Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）；Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar（印度理工学院甘地纳格尔分校）
We develop three efficient approaches for generating visual explanations from 3D convolutional neural networks (3D-CNNs) for Alzheimer's disease classification. One approach conducts sensitivity analysis on hierarchical 3D image segmentation, and the other two visualize network activations on a spatial map. Visual checks and a quantitative localization benchmark indicate that all approaches identify important brain parts for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. Comparative analysis show that the sensitivity analysis based approach has difficulty handling loosely distributed cerebral cortex, and appr…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；University of Texas San Antonio Health Science Center（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥健康科学中心）；National Institute on Aging（美国国家老龄化研究所）
Heterogeneity of brain diseases is a challenge for precision diagnosis/prognosis. We describe and validate Smile-GAN (SeMI-supervised cLustEring-Generative Adversarial Network), a novel semi-supervised deep-clustering method, which dissects neuroanatomical heterogeneity, enabling identification of disease subtypes via their imaging signatures relative to controls. When applied to MRIs (2 studies; 2,832 participants; 8,146 scans) including cognitively normal individuals and those with cognitive impairment and dementia, Smile-GAN identified 4 neurodegenerative patterns/axes: P1, normal anatomy a…
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are becoming prominent models for semi-automated diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Although being highly accurate, deep CNN models lack transparency and interpretability, precluding adequate clinical reasoning and not complying with most current regulatory demands. One popular choice for explaining deep image models is occluding regions of the image to isolate their influence on the prediction. However, existing methods for occluding patches of brain scans generate images outside the distribution to whi…
Deep Learning in Early Alzheimer's disease's Detection: A Comprehensive Survey of Classification, Segmentation, and Feature Extraction Methods
University of Wah（瓦赫大学）；NUST（国家科技大学）；Washington University of Science and Technology Virginia（弗吉尼亚华盛顿科技大学）；Kansas State University（堪萨斯州立大学）；University of Alaska Anchorage（阿拉斯加安克雷奇大学）；State University of New York Polytechnic Institute（纽约州立大学理工学院）
Cell image analysis is crucial in Alzheimer's research to detect the presence of A$β$ protein inhibiting cell function. Deep learning speeds up the process by making only low-level data sufficient for fruitful inspection. We first found Unet is most suitable in augmented microscopy by comparing performance in multi-class semantics segmentation. We develop the augmented microscopy method to capture nuclei in a brightfield image and the transformer using Unet model to convert an input image into a sequence of topological information. The performance regarding Intersection-over-Union is consisten…
University of Engineering and Technology Taxila（塔克西拉工程技术大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive and incurable neurodegenerative disease which destroys brain cells and causes loss to patient's memory. An early detection can prevent the patient from further damage of the brain cells and hence avoid permanent memory loss. In past few years, various automatic tools and techniques have been proposed for diagnosis of AD. Several methods focus on fast, accurate and early detection of the disease to minimize the loss to patients mental health. Although machine learning and deep learning techniques have significantly improved medical imaging systems for A…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
Early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its prodromal period mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is essential for the delayed disease progression and the improved quality of patients'life. The emerging computer-aided diagnostic methods that combine deep learning with structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) have achieved encouraging results, but some of them are limit of issues such as data leakage and unexplainable diagnosis. In this research, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach for automated diagnosis of AD and localization of important brain regions rel…
Neuroimaging of large populations is valuable to identify factors that promote or resist brain disease, and to assist diagnosis, subtyping, and prognosis. Data-driven models such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have increasingly been applied to brain images to perform diagnostic and prognostic tasks by learning robust features. Vision transformers (ViT) - a new class of deep learning architectures - have emerged in recent years as an alternative to CNNs for several computer vision applications. Here we tested variants of the ViT architecture for a range of desired neuroimaging downstre…
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
Background:Cognitive assessments represent the most common clinical routine for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Given a large number of cognitive assessment tools and time-limited office visits, it is important to determine a proper set of cognitive tests for different subjects. Most current studies create guidelines of cognitive test selection for a targeted population, but they are not customized for each individual subject. In this manuscript, we develop a machine learning paradigm enabling personalized cognitive assessments prioritization. Method: We adapt a newly developed lear…
Purpose Predicting the progression of MCI to Alzheimer's disease is an important step in reducing the progression of the disease. Therefore, many methods have been introduced for this task based on deep learning. Among these approaches, the methods based on ROIs are in a good position in terms of accuracy and complexity. In these techniques, some specific parts of the brain are extracted as ROI manually for all of the patients. Extracting ROI manually is time-consuming and its results depend on human expertness and precision. Method To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel smart metho…
