Uncertainty-aware multi-path framework with dynamic arbitration for Alzheimer's disease MRI classification.

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Abstract

As a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires early and accurate diagnosis to delay pathological progression and improve clinical outcomes. Recently, Deeplearning methods based on structural MRI (sMRI) have been widely used for computer-aided AD diagnosis. However, reliable deployment remains challenging due to its sample-specific heterogeneity and the lack of explicit mechanisms for handling prediction uncertainty. In addition, common test-time perturbations and augmentation-based inference strategies could introduce anatomical inconsistency in medical images, leading to unstable decisions for hard cases. Accordingly, TriPathNet with Arbiter, as an uncertainty-aware multi-path framework, is proposed in the study. The framework learns spatially complementary representations via multi-view parallel encoding with metric-guided coordination. In addition, an augmentation-aware arbitration mechanism is introduced to adaptively correct predictions for high-uncertainty samples during inference. On the ADNI dataset for the AD vs. cognitively normal (CN) task, the proposed method achieves 98.85% accuracy, 99.18% sensitivity, 97.06% specificity, and 99.61% AUC, yielding satisfactory performance. The results indicate that TriPathNet with Arbiter provides an accurate and robust solution for sMRI-based computer-aided AD diagnosis, maintaining stable performance under test-time perturbations.

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