The diagnosis of early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is essential for timely treatment to slow further deterioration. Visualizing the morphological features for the early stages of AD is of great clinical value. In this work, a novel Multidirectional Perception Generative Adversarial Network (MP-GAN) is proposed to visualize the morphological features indicating the severity of AD for patients of different stages. Specifically, by introducing a novel multidirectional mapping mechanism into the model, the proposed MP-GAN can capture the salient global features efficiently. Thus, by utilizing the class-discriminative map from the generator, the proposed model can clearly delineate the subtle lesions via MR image transformations between the source domain and the pre-defined target domain. Besides, by integrating the adversarial loss, classification loss, cycle consistency loss and \emph{L}1 penalty, a single generator in MP-GAN can learn the class-discriminative maps for multiple-classes. Extensive experimental results on Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset demonstrate that MP-GAN achieves superior performance compared with the existing methods. The lesions visualized by MP-GAN are also consistent with what clinicians observe.
@article{arxiv.2111.12886,
title = {Morphological feature visualization of Alzheimer's disease via Multidirectional Perception GAN},
author = {Wen Yu and Baiying Lei and Yanyan Shen and Shuqiang Wang and Yong Liu and Zhiguang Feng and Yong Hu and Michael K. Ng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.12886},
year = {2021}
}