Dynamic Multi-Task Graph Isomorphism Network for Classification of Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive, irreversible neurodegenerative disorder that requires early diagnosis for timely treatment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique for detecting brain activity. To improve the accuracy of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, we propose a new network architecture called Dynamic Multi-Task Graph Isomorphism Network (DMT-GIN). This approach uses fMRI images transformed into brain network structures to classify Alzheimer’s disease more effectively. In the DMT-GIN architecture, we integrate an attention mechanism with the Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN) to capture node features and topological structure information. To further enhance AD classification performance, we incorporate auxiliary tasks of gender and age classification prediction alongside the primary AD classification task in the network. This is achieved through sharing network parameters and adaptive weight adjustments for simultaneous task optimization. Additionally, we introduce a method called GradNorm for dynamically balancing gradient updates between tasks. Evaluation results demonstrate that the DMT-GIN model outperforms existing baseline methods on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database, leading in various metrics with a prediction accuracy of 90.44%. This indicates that our DMT-GIN model effectively captures brain network features, providing a powerful auxiliary means for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.