GateFuseNet: An Adaptive 3D Multimodal Neuroimaging Fusion Network for Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis

TL;DR

GateFuseNet is an adaptive 3D multimodal neural network that fuses QSM and T1w MRI images using a gated attention mechanism, significantly improving Parkinson's disease diagnosis accuracy.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel hierarchical gated fusion module for effective multimodal MRI integration in PD diagnosis, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Achieved 85% accuracy and 92.06% AUC in PD diagnosis

Validated the importance of ROI guidance and multimodal fusion

Demonstrated superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches

Abstract

Accurate diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) from MRI remains challenging due to symptom variability and pathological heterogeneity. Most existing methods rely on conventional magnitude-based MRI modalities, such as T1-weighted images (T1w), which are less sensitive to PD pathology than Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM), a phase-based MRI technique that quantifies iron deposition in deep gray matter nuclei. In this study, we propose GateFuseNet, an adaptive 3D multimodal fusion network that integrates QSM and T1w images for PD diagnosis. The core innovation lies in a gated fusion module that learns modality-specific attention weights and channel-wise gating vectors for selective feature modulation. This hierarchical gating mechanism enhances ROI-aware features while suppressing irrelevant signals. Experimental results show that our method outperforms three existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving 85.00% accuracy and 92.06% AUC. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of ROI guidance, multimodal integration, and fusion positioning. Grad-CAM visualizations confirm the model's focus on clinically relevant pathological regions. The source codes and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/YangGaoUQ/GateFuseNet