Multimodal fusion model for diagnosing mild cognitive impairment in unilateral middle cerebral artery steno-occlusive disease.

Objectives: To propose a multimodal functional brain network (FBN) and structural brain network (SBN) topological feature fusion technique based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), 3D-T1-weighted imaging (3D-T1WI), and demographic characteristics to diagnose mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in patients with unilateral middle cerebral artery (MCA) steno-occlusive disease. Methods: The performances of different algorithms on the MCI dataset were evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. The diagnostic results of the multimodal performance were evaluated using t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) analysis. The four-modal analysis method proposed in this study was applied to identify brain regions and connections associated with MCI, thus confirming its validity. Results: Based on the fusion of the topological features of the multimodal FBN and SBN, the accuracy for the diagnosis of MCI in patients with unilateral MCA steno-occlusive disease reached 90.00%. The accuracy, recall, sensitivity, and F1-score were higher than those of the other methods, as was the diagnostic efficacy (AUC = 0.9149). Conclusion: The multimodal FBN and SBN topological feature fusion technique, which incorporates rs-fMRI, DTI, 3D-T1WI, and demographic characteristics, obtains the most discriminative features of MCI in patients with unilateral MCA steno-occlusive disease and can effectively identify disease-related brain areas and connections. Efficient automated diagnosis facilitates the early and accurate detection of MCI and timely intervention and treatment to delay or prevent disease progression.