Comorbidity-Informed Transfer Learning for Neuro-developmental Disorder Diagnosis
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 13, 2025
Abstract
Neuro-developmental disorders are manifested as dysfunctions in cognition,
communication, behaviour and adaptability, and deep learning-based
computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) can alleviate the increasingly strained
healthcare resources on neuroimaging. However, neuroimaging such as fMRI
contains complex spatio-temporal features, which makes the corresponding
representations susceptible to a variety of distractions, thus leading to less
effective in CAD. For the first time, we present a Comorbidity-Informed
Transfer Learning(CITL) framework for diagnosing neuro-developmental disorders
using fMRI. In CITL, a new reinforced representation generation network is
proposed, which first combines transfer learning with pseudo-labelling to
remove interfering patterns from the temporal domain of fMRI and generates new
representations using encoder-decoder architecture. The new representations are
then trained in an architecturally simple classification network to obtain CAD
model. In particular, the framework fully considers the comorbidity mechanisms
of neuro-developmental disorders and effectively integrates them with
semi-supervised learning and transfer learning, providing new perspectives on
interdisciplinary. Experimental results demonstrate that CITL achieves
competitive accuracies of 76.32% and 73.15% for detecting autism spectrum
disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, respectively, which
outperforms existing related transfer learning work for 7.2% and 0.5%
respectively.
