3D Transformer based on deformable patch location for differential diagnosis between Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D transformer architecture with deformable patch locations and data augmentation techniques to improve differential diagnosis between Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia using MRI data.

Contribution

It presents a new 3D transformer model with deformable patches and combines it with traditional machine learning, addressing data scarcity and enhancing diagnostic accuracy.

Findings

Competitive results against state-of-the-art methods

Effective visualization of relevant brain regions

Improved diagnosis accuracy with combined models

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia are common types of neurodegenerative disorders that present overlapping clinical symptoms, making their differential diagnosis very challenging. Numerous efforts have been done for the diagnosis of each disease but the problem of multi-class differential diagnosis has not been actively explored. In recent years, transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable success in various computer vision tasks. However, their use in disease diagnostic is uncommon due to the limited amount of 3D medical data given the large size of such models. In this paper, we present a novel 3D transformer-based architecture using a deformable patch location module to improve the differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and Frontotemporal dementia. Moreover, to overcome the problem of data scarcity, we propose an efficient combination of various data augmentation techniques, adapted for training transformer-based models on 3D structural magnetic resonance imaging data. Finally, we propose to combine our transformer-based model with a traditional machine learning model using brain structure volumes to better exploit the available data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, showing competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the deformable patch locations can be visualized, revealing the most relevant brain regions used to establish the diagnosis of each disease.