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Main Authors: Rahman, Maxx Richard, Hammouda, Mostafa, Maass, Wolfgang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03881
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author Rahman, Maxx Richard
Hammouda, Mostafa
Maass, Wolfgang
author_facet Rahman, Maxx Richard
Hammouda, Mostafa
Maass, Wolfgang
contents Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a major challenge due to the subtle and temporally irregular progression of structural brain changes in the prodromal stages. Existing deep learning approaches require large longitudinal datasets and often fail to model the temporal continuity and modality irregularities inherent in real-world clinical data. To address these limitations, we propose the Diffusion-Guided Attention Network (DiGAN), which integrates latent diffusion modelling with an attention-guided convolutional network. The diffusion model synthesizes realistic longitudinal neuroimaging trajectories from limited training data, enriching temporal context and improving robustness to unevenly spaced visits. The attention-convolutional layer then captures discriminative structural-temporal patterns that distinguish cognitively normal subjects from those with mild cognitive impairment and subjective cognitive decline. Experiments on the ADNI dataset demonstrate that DiGAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, showing its potential for early-stage AD detection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03881
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiGAN: Diffusion-Guided Attention Network for Early Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Rahman, Maxx Richard
Hammouda, Mostafa
Maass, Wolfgang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a major challenge due to the subtle and temporally irregular progression of structural brain changes in the prodromal stages. Existing deep learning approaches require large longitudinal datasets and often fail to model the temporal continuity and modality irregularities inherent in real-world clinical data. To address these limitations, we propose the Diffusion-Guided Attention Network (DiGAN), which integrates latent diffusion modelling with an attention-guided convolutional network. The diffusion model synthesizes realistic longitudinal neuroimaging trajectories from limited training data, enriching temporal context and improving robustness to unevenly spaced visits. The attention-convolutional layer then captures discriminative structural-temporal patterns that distinguish cognitively normal subjects from those with mild cognitive impairment and subjective cognitive decline. Experiments on the ADNI dataset demonstrate that DiGAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, showing its potential for early-stage AD detection.
title DiGAN: Diffusion-Guided Attention Network for Early Alzheimer's Disease Detection
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03881