Transfer learning has been widely utilized to mitigate the data scarcity problem in the field of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Conventional transfer learning relies on re-using models trained on AD-irrelevant tasks such as natural image classification. However, it often leads to negative transfer due to the discrepancy between the non-medical source and target medical domains. To address this, we present evidence-empowered transfer learning for AD diagnosis. Unlike conventional approaches, we leverage an AD-relevant auxiliary task, namely morphological change prediction, without requiring additional MRI data. In this auxiliary task, the diagnosis model learns the evidential and transferable knowledge from morphological features in MRI scans. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework is not only effective in improving detection performance regardless of model capacity, but also more data-efficient and faithful.

翻译：迁移学习已被广泛应用于缓解阿尔茨海默病（AD）领域中的数据稀缺问题。传统的迁移学习依赖于复用针对非AD相关任务（如自然图像分类）训练的模型。然而，由于非医学源域与目标医学域之间的差异，这种方法往往导致负迁移。为解决这一问题，我们提出了一种用于AD诊断的带有证据增强的迁移学习方法。与传统方法不同，我们利用了一项与AD相关的辅助任务，即形态变化预测，且无需额外的MRI数据。在该辅助任务中，诊断模型从MRI扫描的形态特征中学习证据性且可迁移的知识。实验结果表明，无论模型容量如何，我们的框架不仅能够有效提升检测性能，而且具有更高的数据效率和可靠性。