NeuroNet-AD: A Multimodal Deep Learning Framework for Multiclass Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent form of dementia. This disease significantly impacts cognitive functions and daily activities. Early and accurate diagnosis of AD, including the preliminary stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), is critical for effective patient care and treatment development. Although advancements in deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) models improve diagnostic precision, the lack of large datasets limits further enhancements, necessitating the use of complementary data. Existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) effectively process visual features but struggle to fuse multimodal data effectively for AD diagnosis. To address these challenges, we propose NeuroNet-AD, a novel multimodal CNN framework designed to enhance AD classifcation accuracy. NeuroNet-AD integrates Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images with clinical text-based metadata, including psychological test scores, demographic information, and genetic biomarkers. In NeuroNet-AD, we incorporate Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAMs) within the ResNet-18 backbone, enabling the model to focus on the most informative spatial and channel-wise features. We introduce an attention computation and multimodal fusion module, named Meta Guided Cross Attention (MGCA), which facilitates effective cross-modal alignment between images and meta-features through a multi-head attention mechanism. Additionally, we employ an ensemble-based feature selection strategy to identify the most discriminative features from the textual data, improving model generalization and performance. We evaluate NeuroNet-AD on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI1) dataset using subject-level 5-fold cross-validation and a held-out test set to ensure robustness. NeuroNet-AD achieved 98.68% accuracy in multiclass classification of normal control (NC), MCI, and AD and 99.13% accuracy in the binary setting (NC vs. AD) on the ADNI dataset, outperforming state-of-the-art models. External validation on the OASIS-3 dataset further confirmed the model’s generalization ability, achieving 94.10% accuracy in the multiclass setting and 98.67% accuracy in the binary setting, despite variations in demographics and acquisition protocols. Further extensive evaluation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of NeuroNet-AD in improving the performance.