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arXiv · 2407.02418

AXIAL: Attention-based eXplainability for Interpretable Alzheimer's Localized Diagnosis using 2D CNNs on 3D MRI brain scans

Gabriele Lozupone·Alessandro Bria·Francesco Fontanella·Frederick J. A. Meijer·Claudio De Stefano
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Abstract

This study presents an innovative method for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis using 3D MRI designed to enhance the explainability of model decisions. Our approach adopts a soft attention mechanism, enabling 2D CNNs to extract volumetric representations. At the same time, the importance of each slice in decision-making is learned, allowing the generation of a voxel-level attention map to produce an explainable MRI. To test our method and ensure the reproducibility of our results, we chose a standardized collection of MRI data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). On this dataset, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in (i) distinguishing AD from cognitive normal (CN) with an accuracy of 0.856 and Matthew's correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.712, representing improvements of 2.4% and 5.3% respectively over the second-best, and (ii) in the prognostic task of discerning stable from progressive mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with an accuracy of 0.725 and MCC of 0.443, showing improvements of 10.2% and 20.5% respectively over the second-best. We achieved this prognostic result by adopting a double transfer learning strategy, which enhanced sensitivity to morphological changes and facilitated early-stage AD detection. With voxel-level precision, our method identified which specific areas are being paid attention to, identifying these predominant brain regions: the hippocampus, the amygdala, the parahippocampal, and the inferior lateral ventricles. All these areas are clinically associated with AD development. Furthermore, our approach consistently found the same AD-related areas across different cross-validation folds, proving its robustness and precision in highlighting areas that align closely with known pathological markers of the disease.

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BibTeXRIS

Gabriele Lozupone, Alessandro Bria, Francesco Fontanella, Frederick J. A. Meijer, Claudio De Stefano. 2024-10-01. AXIAL: Attention-based eXplainability for Interpretable Alzheimer's Localized Diagnosis using 2D CNNs on 3D MRI brain scans. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02418

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