Brain Status Transferring Generative Adversarial Network for Decoding Individualized Atrophy in Alzheimer's Disease

Deep learning has been widely investigated in brain image computational analysis for diagnosing brain diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Most of the existing methods built end-to-end models to learn discriminative features by group-wise analysis. However, these methods cannot detect pathological changes in each subject, which is essential for the individualized interpretation of disease variances and precision medicine. In this article, we propose a brain status transferring generative adversarial network (BrainStatTrans-GAN) to generate corresponding healthy images of patients, which are further used to decode individualized brain atrophy. The BrainStatTrans-GAN consists of generator, discriminator, and status discriminator. First, a normative GAN is built to generate healthy brain images from normal controls. However, it cannot generate healthy images from diseased ones due to the lack of paired healthy and diseased images. To address this problem, a status discriminator with adversarial learning is designed in the training process to produce healthy brain images for patients. Then, the residual between the generated and input images can be computed to quantify pathological brain changes. Finally, a residual-based multi-level fusion network (RMFN) is built for more accurate disease diagnosis. Compared to the existing methods, our method can model individualized brain atrophy for facilitating disease diagnosis and interpretation. Experimental results on T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of 1,739 subjects from three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.