Explainable Vision Transformer with Self-Supervised Learning to Predict Alzheimer's Disease Progression Using 18F-FDG PET

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. Early and accurate prediction of AD progression is crucial for early intervention and personalized treatment planning. Although AD does not yet have a reliable therapy, several medications help slow down the disease's progression. However, more study is still needed to develop reliable methods for detecting AD and its phases. In the recent past, biomarkers associated with AD have been identified using neuroimaging methods. To uncover biomarkers, deep learning techniques have quickly emerged as a crucial methodology. A functional molecular imaging technique known as fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (18F-FDG-PET) has been shown to be effective in assisting researchers in understanding the morphological and neurological alterations to the brain associated with AD. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have also long dominated the field of AD progression and have been the subject of substantial research, while more recent approaches like vision transformers (ViT) have not yet been fully investigated. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning (SSL) method to automatically acquire meaningful AD characteristics using the ViT architecture by pretraining the feature extractor using the self-distillation with no labels (DINO) and extreme learning machine (ELM) as classifier models. In this work, we examined a technique for predicting mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD utilizing an SSL model which learns powerful representations from unlabeled 18F-FDG PET images, thus reducing the need for large-labeled datasets. In comparison to several earlier approaches, our strategy showed state-of-the-art classification performance in terms of accuracy (92.31%), specificity (90.21%), and sensitivity (95.50%). Then, to make the suggested model easier to understand, we highlighted the brain regions that significantly influence the prediction of MCI development. Our methods offer a precise and efficient strategy for predicting the transition from MCI to AD. In conclusion, this research presents a novel Explainable SSL-ViT model that can accurately predict AD progress based on 18F-FDG PET scans. SSL, attention, and ELM mechanisms are integrated into the model to make it more predictive and interpretable. Future research will enable the development of viable treatments for neurodegenerative disorders by combining brain areas contributing to projection with observed anatomical traits.