# Deep Joint Learning of Pathological Region Localization and Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Bag of Tricks for Image Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01187/) (2018)
- [An Intriguing Failing of Convolutional Neural Networks and the CoordConv Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03247/) (2018)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [Approximating CNNs with Bag-of-local-Features models works surprisingly well on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00760/) (2019)
- [Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer-Aided Detection: CNN Architectures, Dataset Characteristics and Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03409/) (2016)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Not-so-supervised: a survey of semi-supervised, multi-instance, and transfer learning in medical image analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06353/) (2018)
- [Multiple Instance Learning: A Survey of Problem Characteristics and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03365/) (2016)
- [Automated brain extraction of multi-sequence MRI using artificial neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11341/) (2019)
- [Learn To Pay Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02391/) (2018)
- [Residual and Plain Convolutional Neural Networks for 3D Brain MRI Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06643/) (2017)
- [Uncovering convolutional neural network decisions for diagnosing multiple sclerosis on conventional MRI using layer-wise relevance propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08771/) (2019)
- [On the design of convolutional neural networks for automatic detection of Alzheimer's disease](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03740/) (2019)
- [Label Stability in Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04986/) (2017)
- [Alzheimer's Disease Brain MRI Classification: Challenges and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04231/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and its early stages using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been attracting the attention of researchers. Various data-driven approaches have been introduced to capture subtle and local morphological changes of the brain accompanied by the disease progression. One of the typical approaches for capturing subtle changes is patch-level feature representation. However, the predetermined regions to extract patches can limit classification performance by interrupting the exploration of potential biomarkers. In addition, the existing patch-level analyses have difficulty explaining their decision-making. To address these problems, we propose the BrainBagNet with a position-based gate (PG-BrainBagNet), a framework for jointly learning pathological region localization and AD diagnosis in an end-to-end manner. In advance, as all scans are aligned to a template in image processing, the position of brain images can be represented through the 3D Cartesian space shared by the overall MRI scans. The proposed method represents the patch-level response from whole-brain MRI scans and discriminative brain-region from position information. Based on the outcomes, the patch-level class evidence is calculated, and then the image-level prediction is inferred by a transparent aggregation. The proposed models were evaluated on the ADNI datasets. In five-fold cross-validation, the classification performance of the proposed method outperformed that of the state-of-the-art methods in both AD diagnosis (AD vs. normal control) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction (progressive MCI vs. stable MCI) tasks. In addition, changes in the identified discriminant regions and patch-level class evidence according to the patch size used for model training are presented and analyzed.