Contrastive learning and advanced bundle metrics outperform fractional anisotropy for Alzheimer's disease diffusion...

The inclusion of diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) in major national studies has allowed for quantification and characterization of white matter macrostructure and microstructure in cases of disease and disorder. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) yields 3D scalar maps to summarize the DW-MRI signal with quantitative metrics. Fractional anisotropy (FA) is a DTI metric that describes the degree of anisotropy within diffusion and is frequently used to interpret white matter integrity, but it exhibits high sensitivity in pathological interpretation. These properties of FA make it difficult to use as a consistent candidate imaging biomarker, as it makes different ages, cognitive statuses, and pathologies difficult to discern. With the development of other white matter models and metrics, such as structural connectivity network measures and tractography bundle analyses, there are many combinations to analyze for white matter integrity analysis, especially in the context of lower-quality clinical data that FA's voxel-wise computation can be sensitive to. The widespread collection of DW-MRI data necessitates an analysis of these metrics to interpret white matter integrity beyond what FA can capture.

We designed a challenge for the medical imaging community to compare crowdsourced DW-MRI candidate imaging biomarkers to a baseline relying on FA in an age, sex, and cognitive status classification task and variables unknown to teams during the challenge. After the challenge submission period ended, we evaluated methods based on sensitivity to environmental variables (humidity and temperature on the day of the scan), and we correlated features with known Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology (amyloid beta 42, tau, and ptau cerebrospinal fluid/CSF readings) to evaluate if the methods collected in this study are robust to the limitations of FA. The key innovations are that we crowdsource DW-MRI feature representations for AD, we develop a framework to compare imaging feature representations in this context, we evaluate the sensitivity of DW-MRI imaging candidate biomarkers to environmental variables, and we correlate the novel features to known AD pathological measures.

We find that bundle-based methods outperform whole-brain methods in age classification tasks, but deep learning, computer vision-based methods show a new avenue for cognitive status prediction tasks.

The submissions to our challenge show that there are many approaches to consider when developing new AD feature representations.