Multi-scale convolutional neural networks for brain disease diagnosis

The brain is the most sophisticated and complex organ in the human body. Nowadays, diagnosing complex and diverse brain diseases is a hot topic. Alzheimer's Disease (AD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and others are common brain diseases. With the increased usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical image analysis, the endeavor to make AI comprehend brain images for assisting doctors in making objective diagnoses of brain diseases has gained considerable attention. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a widely used tool for diagnosing and analyzing brain diseases.Currently, the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) method constructs a dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) network using a fixed window size. However, this method has limitations as it is challenging to extract potential high-level features from the dFC and determine local feature relevance. This paper presents a method for constructing dFC based on multi-scale sliding windows and proposes Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Networks (MsCNN) for learning and analyzing dFC at various scales. Finally, a deep fusion of features learned at different scales is employed for the diagnostic classification of brain diseases.Applied to the rs-fMRI dataset from ADNI, the classification accuracy was 84.0% for eMCI/lMCI, 84.4% for lMCI/AD, and 58.4% for NC/eMCI/lMCI/AD. Applied to rs-fMRI data from ABIDE, the accuracy was 74.7% for ASD/NC. The proposed method exhibits robust classification performance and introduces a new approach to diagnosing other brain diseases.