Cited by 32Dementia and Cognitive Impairment ResearchAdvanced Image Fusion TechniquesAlzheimer's disease research and treatments

A Review of Multimodal Fusion–Based Deep Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease

Zhang, Rong, Sheng, Jinhua, Zhang, Qiao, Wang, Junmei, Wang, Binbing·2025·Neuroscience

Abstract

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) as one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorders worldwide, characterized by significant memory and cognitive decline in its later stages, severely impacting daily lives. Consequently, early diagnosis and accurate assessment are crucial for delaying disease progression. In recent years, multimodal imaging has gained widespread adoption in AD diagnosis and research, particularly the combined use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). The complementarity of these modalities in structural and metabolic information offers a unique advantage for comprehensive disease understanding and precise diagnosis. With the rapid advancement of deep learning techniques, efficient fusion of MRI and PET multimodal data has emerged as a prominent research focus. This review systematically surveys the latest advancements in deep learning-based multimodal fusion of MRI and PET images for AD research, with a particular focus on studies published in the past five years (2021-2025). It first introduces the main sources of AD-related data, along with data preprocessing and feature extraction methods. Then, it summarizes performance metrics and multimodal fusion techniques. Next, it explores the application of various deep learning models and their variants in multimodal fusion tasks. Finally, it analyzes the key challenges currently faced in the field, including data scarcity and imbalance, inter-institutional data heterogeneity, etc., and discusses potential solutions and future research directions. This review aims to provide systematic guidance for researchers in the field of MRI and PET multimodal fusion, with the ultimate goal of advancing the development of early AD diagnosis and intervention strategies.

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Crossref · 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2025.04.035

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  • The reduced discriminative power of subspace-based fusion using variational autoencoders is likely due to information compression in low-dimensional latent space.

    “Intermediate fusion approaches exhibited more heterogeneous behavior: attention-based models showed relatively stable performance across scaling strategies, suggesting robustness to modality heterogeneity, whereas subspace-based fusion using variational autoencoders resulted in reduced discriminative power, likely due to information compression in low-dimensional latent space [52].”

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Authors
Zhang, R., Sheng, J., Zhang, Q., Wang, J., & Wang, B.
Affiliations
  • Hangzhou Dianzi University (CN)
  • Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College (CN)
Corresponding author
  • Sheng, Jinhua
  • Zhang, Qiao
Venue
Neuroscience
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2025-06
Volume
576
Pages
80-95
ISSN
0306-4522 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4409744080
Cited by
32
References
97
Citations by year
2026: 26 · 2025: 6
FWCI
5.72
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
  • Hangzhou Dianzi University (IRB-2020001)
  • Zhejiang Province Natural Science Foundation (LZ24F010007, LQ23F020014)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62271177, 62401189)
  • Beijing Hospital (2022BJYYEC-375-01)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Dementia and Cognitive Impairment Research
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Media Technology › Advanced Image Fusion Techniques
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Alzheimer's disease research and treatments
Keywords
Alzheimer's disease, multimodal fusion, MRI-PET fusion, deep learning, early diagnosis, neurodegenerative diseases, data scarcity, class imbalance, feature extraction, data preprocessing
MeSH terms
Deep Learning, Alzheimer Disease, Brain, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Positron-Emission Tomography, Neuroimaging, Multimodal Imaging

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