PD-Diag-Net: Clinical-Priors guided Network on Brain MRI for Auxiliary Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disorder that severely diminishes patients' quality of life. Its global prevalence has increased markedly in recent decades. Current diagnostic workflows are complex and heavily reliant on neurologists' expertise, often resulting in delays in early detection and missed opportunities for timely intervention. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end automated diagnostic method for PD, termed PD-Diag-Net, which performs risk assessment and auxiliary diagnosis directly from raw MRI scans. This framework first introduces an MRI Pre-processing Module (MRI-Processor) to mitigate inter-subject and inter-scanner variability by flexibly integrating established medical imaging preprocessing tools. It then incorporates two forms of clinical prior knowledge: (1) Brain-Region-Relevance-Prior (Relevance-Prior), which specifies brain regions strongly associated with PD; and (2) Brain-Region-Aging-Prior (Aging-Prior), which reflects the accelerated aging typically observed in PD-associated regions. Building on these priors, we design two dedicated modules: the Relevance-Prior Guided Feature Aggregation Module (Aggregator), which guides the model to focus on PD-associated regions at the inter-subject level, and the Age-Prior Guided Diagnosis Module (Diagnoser), which leverages brain age gaps as auxiliary constraints at the intra-subject level to enhance diagnostic accuracy and clinical interpretability. Furthermore, we collected external test data from our collaborating hospital. Experimental results show that PD-Diag-Net achieves 86\% accuracy on external tests and over 96% accuracy in early-stage diagnosis, outperforming existing advanced methods by more than 20%.