Multi-Task Weakly-Supervised Attention Network for Dementia Status Estimation With Structural MRI

Accurate prediction of clinical scores (of neuropsychological tests) based on noninvasive structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) helps understand the pathological stage of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s disease (AD)) and forecast its progression. Existing machine/deep learning approaches typically preselect dementia-sensitive brain locations for MRI feature extraction and model construction, potentially leading to undesired heterogeneity between different stages and degraded prediction performance. Besides, these methods usually rely on prior anatomical knowledge (e.g., brain atlas) and time-consuming nonlinear registration for the preselection of brain locations, thereby ignoring individual-specific structural changes during dementia progression because all subjects share the same preselected brain regions. In this article, we propose a multi-task weakly-supervised attention network (MWAN) for the joint regression of multiple clinical scores from baseline MRI scans. Three sequential components are included in MWAN: 1) a backbone fully convolutional network for extracting MRI features; 2) a weakly supervised dementia attention block for automatically identifying subject-specific discriminative brain locations; and 3) an attention-aware multitask regression block for jointly predicting multiple clinical scores. The proposed MWAN is an end-to-end and fully trainable deep learning model in which dementia-aware holistic feature learning and multitask regression model construction are integrated into a unified framework. Our MWAN method was evaluated on two public AD data sets for estimating clinical scores of mini-mental state examination (MMSE), clinical dementia rating sum of boxes (CDRSB), and AD assessment scale cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog). Quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our method produces superior regression performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, qualitative results indicate that the dementia-sensitive brain locations automatically identified by our MWAN method well retain individual specificities and are biologically meaningful.