Multimodal neuroimage data fusion based on multikernel learning in personalized medicine

Neuroimaging has been widely used as a diagnostic technique for brain diseases. With the development of artificial intelligence, neuroimaging analysis using intelligent algorithms can capture more image feature patterns than artificial experience-based diagnosis. However, using only single neuroimaging techniques, e.g., magnetic resonance imaging, may omit some significant patterns that may have high relevance to the clinical target. Therefore, so far, combining different types of neuroimaging techniques that provide multimodal data for joint diagnosis has received extensive attention and research in the area of personalized medicine. In this study, based on the regularized label relaxation linear regression model, we propose a multikernel version for multimodal data fusion. The proposed method inherits the merits of the regularized label relaxation linear regression model and also has its own superiority. It can explore complementary patterns across different modal data and pay more attention to the modal data that have more significant patterns. In the experimental study, the proposed method is evaluated in the scenario of Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis. The promising performance indicates that the performance of multimodality fusion via multikernel learning is better than that of single modality. Moreover, the decreased square difference between training and testing performance indicates that overfitting is reduced and hence the generalization ability is improved.