Prototype-guided multi-scale domain adaptation for Alzheimer's disease detection

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and there is no effective treatment currently. Using artificial intelligence technology to assist the diagnosis and intervention as early as possible is of great significance to delay the development of AD. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has shown great practical values on computer-aided AD diagnosis. Affected by data from different sources or acquisition domains in realistic scenarios, MRI data often suffer from domain shift problem. In this paper, we propose a deep Prototype-Guided Multi-Scale Domain Adaptation (PMDA) framework to handle MRI data with domain shift problem, and realize automatic auxiliary diagnosis of AD, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Cognitively Normal (CN). PMDA is composed of three modules: (1) MRI multi-scale feature extraction module combines the advantages of 3D convolution and self-attention to effectively extract multi-scale features in high-dimensional space, (2) Prototype Maximum Density Divergence (Pro-MDD) module adopts prototype learning to constrain the feature outlier samples in a mini-batch when MDD is used to align source domain and target domain, and (3) Adversarial Domain Adaptation module is applied to achieve global feature alignment of the source domain and target domain and co-training two distinctive discriminators to mitigate the over-fitting issue. Experiments have been performed on 3T and 1.5T sMRI with domain shift in ADNI dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework PMDA outperforms supervised learning methods and several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods and achieves a superior accuracy of 92.11%, 76.01% and 82.37% on AD vs. CN, AD vs. MCI, and MCI vs. CN tasks, respectively.