The study investigates whether a compact, supervised 3D CNN pretrained for brain‑age prediction can act as a reusable foundation model for various Alzheimer's‑related neuroimaging tasks. By freezing the 7.18 million weights and adding only ~1 % of trainable parameters via Low‑Rank Adaptation, the model achieved high performance across six experiments, including dementia classification, MCI progression prediction, amyloid positivity detection, and volume estimation of hippocampal and white matter hypointensities. The results demonstrate that the pretrained brain‑age model generalizes well to new datasets without retraining, offering a data‑efficient alternative to larger networks.
By Reza Rajabli, D. Louis Collins
arXiv:2606.13315v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: MRI self-supervised learning (SSL) has largely emphasized segmentation and dense prediction, while controlled studies of how alternative pretrainin...
By Esra Erg\"un, Hersh Chandarana, Dan Sodickson, Gozde Unal
The paper introduces SYMBA, a self‑supervised pretraining framework tailored for structural T1‑weighted brain MRI. SYMBA uses anatomically constrained masking, a multi‑scale structural similarity reconstruction loss, and a progressive curriculum to capture distributed morphometric patterns. Evaluated on nine heterogeneous cohorts and two unseen datasets, SYMBA outperforms existing neuroimaging foundation models, achieving high AUROC scores for Alzheimer’s disease classification, mild cognitive impairment conversion, and amyloid status prediction, and shows strong sample efficiency in low‑label settings.
By Nuria Balb\'as-Esteban, Albert Belenguer-Llorens, Elaheh Moradi, Jussi Tohka, Vanessa G\'omez-Verdejo, Carlos Sevilla-Salcedo
arXiv:2607. 11656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate diagnostic classification and disease-severity prediction for Alzheimer's disease are hampered by the incompleteness and heterogeneity of real-world clinical data.
By Christelle Schneuwly Diaz, Narmina Baghirova, Duy-Thanh Vu, Duy-Cat Can, Gilles Allali, Philippe Ryvlin, Oliver Y. Ch\'en
arXiv:2609.23983v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Neuroimaging foundation models pretrained on large, predominantly western cohorts are increasingly proposed as general-purpose backbones for brain MRI...
By Oluwatobi Iyanuoluwa Akinmuleya, Olatokun Shamsudeen Akano, Samuel Danquah Ankapong, Olamide Lawal, Toufiq Musah
The study presents an explainable multimodal deep‑learning framework that combines a 3D CNN for T1‑weighted MRI with a feedforward network for harmonized clinical and demographic data to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease. Using 6,479 ADNI records and 1,703 OASIS‑3 records, the authors compare various model configurations on three‑way and pairwise diagnostic tasks, finding that performance and explanations vary by task, modality, fusion strategy, and cohort. SHAP and Integrated Gradients consistently highlight the MMSE score as the most influential tabular feature, while CAM‑based explanations differ across model setups and cohorts, indicating that explainability is not a stable property under cohort shift.
By Yusuf Brima, Marcellin Atemkeng, Lakshmana Rao Namamula, Antoine Vacavant