# NeuroAPS-Net: Neuro-Anatomically Aware Point Cloud Representation for Efficient Alzheimer's Disease Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22883 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22883/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Enhancing MRI-Based Classification of Alzheimer's Disease with Explainable 3D Hybrid Compact Convolutional Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16175/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder and a major cause of dementia. Structural MRI is widely used to analyze AD-related brain atrophy; however, most deep learning methods rely on computationally expensive 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs), limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This work introduces two main contributions. First, we propose a pipeline that converts T1-weighted MRI into anatomically informed 2D point clouds using Anatomical Priority Sampling (APS), producing ADNI-2DPC, the first neuroanatomically labeled MRI-derived point cloud dataset. Second, we present NeuroAPS-Net, a lightweight geometric deep learning model that incorporates anatomical priors via region-aware feature encoding and ROI token aggregation. Experiments on ADNI-2DPC demonstrate that NeuroAPS-Net achieves competitive classification accuracy while significantly reducing inference latency and GPU memory compared to state-of-the-art point cloud methods. These results highlight the potential of anatomically guided point cloud learning as an efficient and interpretable alternative to voxel-based CNNs for AD classification.