Unified Brain Network Representation Learning via Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Alzheimer’s Disease Analysis

Abstract

The fusion of structural and functional brain network analysis has been widely applied in the analysis of various brain diseases, especially in identifying the progression stages of Alzheimer’s disease. However, most existing multimodal brain network analysis methods separately construct functional and structural networks, making it difficult to incorporate complementary information from several modalities. To tackle this difficulty, we propose AMFusion(Adaptive Multimodal Fusion), a unified brain network construction framework that jointly learns from functional and structural images, thereby efficiently resolving connectivity and node feature learning problems. Our approach begins with a designed quantization encoder to extract structural features from DTI, while dynamic functional connectivity (FC) is constructed from fMRI. Subsequently, a multilevel brain network fusion module is employed to learn and integrate brain connections, considering interactions across different temporal and spatial scales. Finally, a classifier guides further optimization of the brain network, facilitating multi-class disease classification. The performance of the proposed AMFusion was validated using the authentic dataset from ADNI, and experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of AMFusion. By considering both connection patterns and node features, our method overcomes the limitations of existing approaches, providing a more comprehensive and robust framework for analyzing and diagnosing AD.