Multi-band network fusion for Alzheimer’s disease identification with functional MRI

Abstract

Introduction: The analysis of functional brain networks (FBNs) has become a promising and powerful tool for auxiliary diagnosis of brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its prodromal stage. Previous studies usually estimate FBNs using full band Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) signal. However, a single band is not sufficient to capture the diagnostic and prognostic information contained in multiple frequency bands. Method: To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-band network fusion framework (MBNF) to combine the various information (e.g., the diversification of structural features) of multi-band FBNs. We first decompose the BOLD signal adaptively into two frequency bands named high-frequency band and low-frequency band by the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). Then the similarity network fusion (SNF) is performed to blend two networks constructed by two frequency bands together into a multi-band fusion network. In addition, we extract the features of the fused network towards a better classification performance. Result: To verify the validity of the scheme, we conduct our MBNF method on the public ADNI database for identifying subjects with AD/MCI from normal controls. Discussion: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme extracts rich multi-band network features and biomarker information, and also achieves better classification accuracy.