HA-HI: Synergising fMRI and DTI through Hierarchical Alignments and Hierarchical Interactions for Mild Cognitive Impairment Diagnosis

TL;DR

This paper introduces HA-HI, a novel method that synergistically combines fMRI and DTI features through hierarchical alignments and interactions to improve early diagnosis of MCI and SCD, with enhanced interpretability.

Contribution

The study proposes a new hierarchical alignment and interaction framework for multi-modal MRI data, improving diagnostic accuracy and interpretability in early cognitive impairment detection.

Findings

HA-HI outperforms existing methods on ADNI and self-collected datasets.

The Synergistic Activation Map (SAM) reveals critical brain regions and connections.

The approach enhances early detection of MCI and SCD with interpretable features.

Abstract

Early diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subjective cognitive decline (SCD) utilizing multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a pivotal area of research. While various regional and connectivity features from functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) have been employed to develop diagnosis models, most studies integrate these features without adequately addressing their alignment and interactions. This limits the potential to fully exploit the synergistic contributions of combined features and modalities. To solve this gap, our study introduces a novel Hierarchical Alignments and Hierarchical Interactions (HA-HI) method for MCI and SCD classification, leveraging the combined strengths of fMRI and DTI. HA-HI efficiently learns significant MCI- or SCD- related regional and connectivity features by aligning various feature types and hierarchically maximizing their interactions. Furthermore, to enhance the interpretability of our approach, we have developed the Synergistic Activation Map (SAM) technique, revealing the critical brain regions and connections that are indicative of MCI/SCD. Comprehensive evaluations on the ADNI dataset and our self-collected data demonstrate that HA-HI outperforms other existing methods in diagnosing MCI and SCD, making it a potentially vital and interpretable tool for early detection. The implementation of this method is publicly accessible at https://github.com/ICI-BCI/Dual-MRI-HA-HI.git.