Multimodal Triplet Attention Network for Brain Disease Diagnosis

Multi-modal imaging data fusion has attracted much attention in medical data analysis because it can provide complementary information for more accurate analysis. Integrating functional and structural multi-modal imaging data has been increasingly used in the diagnosis of brain diseases, such as epilepsy. Most of the existing methods focus on the feature space fusion of different modalities but ignore the valuable high-order relationships among samples and the discriminative fused features for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by fusing data from two modalities of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for epilepsy diagnosis, which effectively captures the complementary information and discriminative features from different modalities by high-order feature extraction with the attention mechanism. Specifically, we propose a triple network to explore the discriminative information from the high-order representation feature space learned from multi-modal data. Meanwhile, self-attention is introduced to adaptively estimate the degree of importance between brain regions, and the cross-attention mechanism is utilized to extract complementary information from fMRI and DTI. Finally, we use the triple loss function to adjust the distance between samples in the common representation space. We evaluate the proposed method on the epilepsy dataset collected from Jinling Hospital, and the experiment results demonstrate that our method is significantly superior to several state-of-the-art diagnosis approaches.