GANDALF: Generative Adversarial Networks with Discriminator-Adaptive Loss Fine-Tuning for Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis from MRI

Abstract

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is now regarded as the gold standard for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). However, PET imaging can be prohibitive in terms of cost and planning, and is also among the imaging techniques with the highest dosage of radiation. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), in contrast, is more widely available and provides more flexibility when setting the desired image resolution. Unfortunately, the diagnosis of AD using MRI is difficult due to the very subtle physiological differences between healthy and AD subjects visible on MRI. As a result, many attempts have been made to synthesize PET images from MR images using generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the interest of enabling the diagnosis of AD from MR. Existing work on PET synthesis from MRI has largely focused on Conditional GANs, where MR images are used to generate PET images and subsequently used for AD diagnosis. There is no end-to-end training goal. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the aforementioned, where AD diagnosis is incorporated in the GAN training objective to achieve the best AD classification performance. Different GAN losses are fine-tuned based on the discriminator performance, and the overall training is stabilized. The proposed network architecture and training regime show state-of-the-art performance for three- and four- class AD classification tasks.