Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pinnawala, Sanduni, Hartanto, Annabelle, Simpson, Ivor J. A., Wijeratne, Peter A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15124
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911161971113984
author Pinnawala, Sanduni
Hartanto, Annabelle
Simpson, Ivor J. A.
Wijeratne, Peter A.
author_facet Pinnawala, Sanduni
Hartanto, Annabelle
Simpson, Ivor J. A.
Wijeratne, Peter A.
contents Modelling the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases demands methods that capture heterogeneous and spatially varying dynamics from sparse, high-dimensional neuroimaging data. Integrating partial differential equation (PDE) based physics knowledge with machine learning provides enhanced interpretability and utility over classic numerical methods. However, current physics-integrated machine learning methods are limited to considering a single PDE, severely limiting their application to diseases where multiple mechanisms are responsible for different groups (i.e., subtypes) and aggravating problems with model misspecification and degeneracy. Here, we present a deep generative model for learning mixtures of latent dynamic models governed by physics-based PDEs, going beyond traditional approaches that assume a single PDE structure. Our method integrates reaction-diffusion PDEs within a variational autoencoder (VAE) mixture model framework, supporting inference of subtypes of interpretable latent variables (e.g. diffusivity and reaction rates) from neuroimaging data. We evaluate our method on synthetic benchmarks and demonstrate its potential for uncovering mechanistic subtypes of Alzheimer's disease progression from positron emission tomography (PET) data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Mechanistic Subtypes of Neurodegeneration with a Physics-Informed Variational Autoencoder Mixture Model
Pinnawala, Sanduni
Hartanto, Annabelle
Simpson, Ivor J. A.
Wijeratne, Peter A.
Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Modelling the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases demands methods that capture heterogeneous and spatially varying dynamics from sparse, high-dimensional neuroimaging data. Integrating partial differential equation (PDE) based physics knowledge with machine learning provides enhanced interpretability and utility over classic numerical methods. However, current physics-integrated machine learning methods are limited to considering a single PDE, severely limiting their application to diseases where multiple mechanisms are responsible for different groups (i.e., subtypes) and aggravating problems with model misspecification and degeneracy. Here, we present a deep generative model for learning mixtures of latent dynamic models governed by physics-based PDEs, going beyond traditional approaches that assume a single PDE structure. Our method integrates reaction-diffusion PDEs within a variational autoencoder (VAE) mixture model framework, supporting inference of subtypes of interpretable latent variables (e.g. diffusivity and reaction rates) from neuroimaging data. We evaluate our method on synthetic benchmarks and demonstrate its potential for uncovering mechanistic subtypes of Alzheimer's disease progression from positron emission tomography (PET) data.
title Learning Mechanistic Subtypes of Neurodegeneration with a Physics-Informed Variational Autoencoder Mixture Model
topic Image and Video Processing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15124