DS-ViT: Dual-Stream Vision Transformer for Cross-Task Distillation in Alzheimer's Early Diagnosis

TL;DR

This paper introduces DS-ViT, a dual-stream vision transformer that facilitates cross-task knowledge sharing for Alzheimer's diagnosis, improving early detection and classification accuracy on limited data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dual-stream architecture with a feature unification module for cross-task and cross-architecture knowledge transfer in Alzheimer's diagnosis.

Findings

Significant improvement in classification accuracy on small datasets.

Effective early diagnosis approximately six months before atrophy.

Enhanced performance with a residual temporal attention mechanism.

Abstract

In the field of Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, segmentation and classification tasks are inherently interconnected. Sharing knowledge between models for these tasks can significantly improve training efficiency, particularly when training data is scarce. However, traditional knowledge distillation techniques often struggle to bridge the gap between segmentation and classification due to the distinct nature of tasks and different model architectures. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-stream pipeline that facilitates cross-task and cross-architecture knowledge sharing. Our approach introduces a dual-stream embedding module that unifies feature representations from segmentation and classification models, enabling dimensional integration of these features to guide the classification model. We validated our method on multiple 3D datasets for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis, demonstrating significant improvements in classification performance, especially on small datasets. Furthermore, we extended our pipeline with a residual temporal attention mechanism for early diagnosis, utilizing images taken before the atrophy of patients' brain mass. This advancement shows promise in enabling diagnosis approximately six months earlier in mild and asymptomatic stages, offering critical time for intervention.