Enhancing early Alzheimer's disease classification accuracy through the fusion of sMRI and rsMEG data: a deep learning approach.

Objective: Early detection and prediction of Alzheimer's Disease are paramount for elucidating neurodegenerative processes and enhancing cognitive resilience. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) provides insights into brain morphology, while resting-state Magnetoencephalography (rsMEG) elucidates functional aspects. However, inherent disparities between these multimodal neuroimaging modalities pose challenges to the effective integration of multimodal features. Approach: To address these challenges, we propose a deep learning-based multimodal classification framework for Alzheimer's disease, which harnesses the fusion of pivotal features from sMRI and rsMEG to augment classification precision. Utilizing the BioFIND dataset, classification trials were conducted on 163 Mild Cognitive Impairment cases and 144 cognitively Healthy Controls. Results: The study findings demonstrate that the InterFusion method, combining sMRI and rsMEG data, achieved a classification accuracy of 0.827. This accuracy significantly surpassed the accuracies obtained by rsMEG only at 0.710 and sMRI only at 0.749. Moreover, the evaluation of different fusion techniques revealed that InterFusion outperformed both EarlyFusion with an accuracy of 0.756 and LateFusion with an accuracy of 0.801. Additionally, the study delved deeper into the role of different frequency band features of rsMEG in fusion by analyzing six frequency bands, thus expanding the diagnostic scope. Discussion: These results highlight the value of integrating resting-state rsMEG and sMRI data in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, demonstrating significant potential in the field of neuroscience diagnostics.