Brain Diffuser: An End-to-End Brain Image to Brain Network Pipeline

Abstract

Brain network analysis is essential for diagnosing and intervention for Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, previous research relied primarily on specific time-consuming and subjective toolkits. Only few tools can obtain the structural brain networks from brain diffusion tensor images (DTI). In this paper, we propose a diffusion based end-to-end brain network generative model Brain Diffuser that directly shapes the structural brain networks from DTI. Compared to existing toolkits, Brain Diffuser exploits more structural connectivity features and disease-related information by analyzing disparities in structural brain networks across subjects. For the case of Alzheimer's disease, the proposed model performs better than the results from existing toolkits on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database.