Hypergraph-regularized multimodal learning by graph diffusion for imaging genetics based Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis

Recent studies show that multi-modal data fusion techniques combining information from diverse sources are helpful to diagnose and predict complex brain disorders. However, most existing diagnosis methods have only simply employed a feature combination strategy for multiple imaging and genetic data, ignoring the imaging phenotypes associated with the risk gene information. To this end, we present a hypergraph-regularized multimodal learning by graph diffusion (HMGD) for joint association learning and outcome prediction. Specifically, we first present a graph diffusion method for enhancing similarity measures among subjects given from multi-modality phenotypes, which fully uses multiple input similarity graphs and integrates them into a unified graph with valuable geometric structures among different imaging phenotypes. Then, we employ the unified graph to represent the high-order similarity relationships among subjects, and enforce a hypergraph-regularized term to incorporate both inter- and cross-modality information for selecting the imaging phenotypes associated with the risk single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). Finally, a multi-kernel support vector machine (MK-SVM) is adopted to fuse such phenotypic features selected from different modalities for the final diagnosis and prediction. The proposed approach is experimentally explored on brain imaging genetic data of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) datasets. Relevant results present that the proposed approach is superior to several competing algorithms, and realizes strong associations and discovers significant consistent and robust ROIs across different imaging phenotypes associated with the genetic risk biomarkers to guide disease interpretation and prediction.