We propose a novel deep neural network architecture to integrate imaging and genetics data, as guided by diagnosis, that provides interpretable biomarkers. Our model consists of an encoder, a decoder and a classifier. The encoder learns a non-linear subspace shared between the input data modalities. The classifier and the decoder act as regularizers to ensure that the low-dimensional encoding captures predictive differences between patients and controls. We use a learnable dropout layer to extract interpretable biomarkers from the data, and our unique training strategy can easily accommodate missing data modalities across subjects. We have evaluated our model on a population study of schizophrenia that includes two functional MRI (fMRI) paradigms and Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) data. Using 10-fold cross validation, we demonstrate that our model achieves better classification accuracy than baseline methods, and that this performance generalizes to a second dataset collected at a different site. In an exploratory analysis we further show that the biomarkers identified by our model are closely associated with the well-documented deficits in schizophrenia.
@article{arxiv.2101.11656,
title = {G-MIND: An End-to-End Multimodal Imaging-Genetics Framework for Biomarker Identification and Disease Classification},
author = {Sayan Ghosal and Qiang Chen and Giulio Pergola and Aaron L. Goldman and William Ulrich and Karen F. Berman and Giuseppe Blasi and Leonardo Fazio and Antonio Rampino and Alessandro Bertolino and Daniel R. Weinberger and Venkata S. Mattay and Archana Venkataraman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.11656},
year = {2021}
}