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+ # TriFuse-AD: An Honest Multimodal Benchmark for Three-Stage Dementia Staging on OASIS-1 Structural MRI
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+
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+ ## Abstract
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+
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+ We present a controlled, leakage-free benchmark for three-stage cognitive
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+ classification — cognitively normal (CN), very mild dementia (VMD, CDR=0.5), and
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+ Alzheimer's dementia (AD, CDR≥1) — on the OASIS-1 cross-sectional cohort, and we
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+ propose **TriFuse-AD**, a tri-planar CNN + slice-plane Transformer with gated
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+ demographic fusion. On an age-restricted cohort (≥60 years, 198 subjects) evaluated
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+ with subject-level repeated stratified 5-fold cross-validation (3 seeds, 15
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+ evaluations per model), we benchmark eleven models spanning tabular, 2D/2.5D/3D
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+ CNN, Vision Transformer, hybrid, and multimodal families, and report Macro-F1 with
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+ bootstrap confidence intervals as the primary metric.
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+
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+ Our central finding is a *negative* but informative one: on this small, confounded
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+ cohort no MRI-only deep network surpasses a plain tabular XGBoost on morphometric
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+ and demographic features (Macro-F1 0.474), and TriFuse-AD (0.488 ± 0.066) does not
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+ significantly outperform a trivial DenseNet late-concatenation baseline (0.497 ±
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+ 0.062; paired permutation p = 0.55). A confound analysis shows a structured-feature
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+ model using whole-brain volume, intracranial volume and demographics alone reaches
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+ Macro-F1 0.480, confirming that most of the recoverable signal on OASIS-1 is
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+ morphometric rather than learned from raw voxels. We report these results
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+ transparently, together with per-class, per-subgroup, ablation, and interpretability
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+ analyses, as a cautionary and reproducible reference point for small-cohort
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+ structural-MRI dementia staging. We make no clinical, diagnostic, state-of-the-art,
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+ or cross-site claims.
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+
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+ **Keywords:** Alzheimer's disease, dementia staging, OASIS-1, structural MRI,
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+ multimodal fusion, confounding, small-sample benchmark, Macro-F1.
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+
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+
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+ ## 1. Introduction
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+
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+ Automated staging of cognitive decline from structural MRI is an attractive goal:
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+ T1-weighted scans are cheap, ubiquitous, and carry well-documented atrophy signatures
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+ of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A large literature reports high accuracy for AD-vs-CN
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+ classification, and a growing body extends this to intermediate stages. Yet much of
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+ this literature is difficult to compare or trust, for three recurring reasons.
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+
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+ First, **label leakage and target-adjacent inputs.** Clinical staging labels such as
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+ the Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) or Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE) are sometimes
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+ fed to the model, directly or through hand-picked features, inflating performance in
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+ a way that would not survive prospective use.
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+
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+ Second, **subject-level leakage.** When multiple scans of the same subject, or
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+ augmented slices from one volume, are split across train and test, the reported
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+ accuracy measures memorization of subjects rather than generalization.
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+
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+ Third, **confounding by age and head size.** Age is strongly correlated with both
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+ brain atrophy and dementia stage; a model that merely reads off age (or a proxy such
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+ as whole-brain volume) can appear to "diagnose from MRI" while learning nothing
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+ disease-specific.
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+
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+ This paper takes the opposite stance to the accuracy-maximizing literature. We build
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+ a deliberately conservative benchmark on the OASIS-1 cross-sectional cohort and ask a
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+ narrower, more honest question: *under leakage-free, age-restricted, subject-level
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+ evaluation, how much three-stage signal is actually recoverable from structural MRI,
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+ and does architectural sophistication help beyond trivial baselines?*
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+
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+ Concretely, our contributions are:
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+
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+ 1. **A reproducible, leakage-free three-stage protocol** on OASIS-1: CN / VMD / AD
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+ from CDR, with an age≥60 restriction to attenuate the age shortcut, one volume
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+ per subject, subject-level repeated stratified cross-validation (15 evaluations),
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+ and CDR/MMSE excluded from all model inputs. Macro-F1 with bootstrap CIs is the
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+ primary metric, not accuracy, because the classes are imbalanced (98/70/30).
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+
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+ 2. **A broad, identically-trained model zoo** — eleven models from tabular XGBoost to
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+ 3D Swin Transformers and two recent CNN-Transformer hybrids, all retrained on our
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+ folds so numbers are mutually comparable and never copied across datasets.
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+
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+ 3. **TriFuse-AD**, a tri-planar shared-CNN encoder with a slice-plane Transformer and
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+ a gated demographic-fusion head, presented not as a winner but as a well-specified
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+ point in the design space that we ablate component-by-component.
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+
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+ 4. **An explicit confound and subgroup analysis** quantifying how much of the signal
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+ is available from demographics and morphometry alone, and how performance varies
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+ across age bands and sex.
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+
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+ Our results are sobering. Multimodal fusion helps — the two top models both fuse MRI
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+ with structured features — but TriFuse-AD's gated tri-planar attention does not beat
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+ a plain late-concatenation baseline, and no MRI-only network beats tabular XGBoost.
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+ We argue that reporting this clearly is more useful to the field than another
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+ incremental accuracy number obtained under looser controls.
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+
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+
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+ ## 2. Related Work
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+
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+ **Deep learning for AD classification.** Convolutional networks on 2D slices, 2.5D
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+ slice stacks, and full 3D volumes have all been applied to ADNI and OASIS. 3D CNNs
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+ (e.g., 3D ResNet, DenseNet variants) model volumetric context directly but are
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+ data-hungry; 2.5D approaches trade volumetric completeness for ImageNet-pretrained
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+ 2D backbones and lower memory. Vision Transformers and 3D Swin Transformers have more
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+ recently been applied to brain MRI, and hybrid CNN-Transformer designs (compact HCCT,
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+ CNN-VSwinFormer) aim to combine local inductive bias with global attention. Reported
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+ accuracies vary widely and are frequently not comparable because of differing
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+ cohorts, label definitions, and validation protocols.
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+
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+ **Multimodal fusion.** Combining imaging with tabular clinical/demographic data is
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+ well established, from early concatenation to gated and attention-based fusion. On
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+ small cohorts, however, the marginal value of sophisticated fusion over simple
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+ concatenation is rarely tested with matched training and statistics.
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+
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+ **Confounding and evaluation critique.** A recurrent methodological thread warns that
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+ age, sex, and head-size confounds, together with subject-level leakage, can dominate
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+ apparent MRI-based performance, and that accuracy on imbalanced stages is misleading.
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+ Our work is squarely in this tradition: rather than proposing a higher number, we
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+ instrument the benchmark to expose how much signal is confound-driven, and we hold
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+ every model to the same leakage-free protocol.
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+
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+ **OASIS-1.** The OASIS cross-sectional release provides T1-weighted scans with CDR,
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+ MMSE, and morphometric summaries (eTIV, nWBV, ASF) for a demographically broad adult
113
+ cohort. It is smaller and less standardized than ADNI, which makes it a realistic
114
+ stress test for small-sample generalization — and a setting where honest reporting of
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+ variance and confounding matters most.
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+
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+
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+ ## 3. Data and Cohort
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+
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+ **Source.** We use the OASIS-1 cross-sectional release (416 subjects, ages 18–96).
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+ Each subject has T1-weighted MPRAGE scans and an atlas-registered, brain-masked,
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+ gain-field-corrected volume (`*_111_t88_masked_gfc`, 176×208×176, 1 mm isotropic),
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+ along with demographic and morphometric summaries: age, sex, education, socioeconomic
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+ status (SES), estimated total intracranial volume (eTIV), normalized whole-brain
125
+ volume (nWBV), atlas scaling factor (ASF), MMSE, and CDR. We reconstruct the
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+ per-subject metadata from the individual OASIS subject records.
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+
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+ **Labels.** We map CDR to three cognitive stages:
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+
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+ | CDR | Stage | Meaning |
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+ |-----|-------|---------|
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+ | 0 | CN | cognitively normal |
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+ | 0.5 | VMD | very mild dementia |
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+ | ≥1 | AD | Alzheimer's dementia |
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+
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+ We deliberately name CDR=0.5 **very mild dementia (VMD)**, not "MCI": the CDR
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+ operationalization is not equivalent to a clinical MCI diagnosis, and conflating them
138
+ would overstate clinical relevance. **CDR and MMSE are never used as model inputs** —
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+ they define or correlate with the label and would constitute leakage. They are
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+ retained only for cohort description and confound analysis.
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+
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+ **Age restriction.** Because age is the dominant confound (young CN subjects are
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+ trivially separable from older AD subjects on brain size alone), we restrict to
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+ **age ≥ 60**. This removes the easy young-CN population and forces models to
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+ discriminate stages within an older cohort where atrophy overlaps across stages.
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+
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+ **Final cohort.** The age≥60 filter yields **198 subjects**: CN = 98, VMD = 70,
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+ AD = 30. Mean age 76.3 ± 8.1; 131 male / 67 female. One volume per subject. The
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+ class imbalance (roughly 3 : 2 : 1) and the small AD count (≈6 AD subjects per test
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+ fold) are central to how we evaluate and how we interpret variance.
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+
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+
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+ ## 4. Method
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+
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+ ### 4.1 Preprocessing
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+
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+ *3D pipeline.* Each volume is loaded, reoriented to a canonical axis order,
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+ cropped to the nonzero brain bounding box, intensity-clipped to the 0.5–99.5
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+ percentile range, z-scored over brain voxels, and resized to 128×128×128 for 3D CNNs
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+ or 96×112×112 for the more memory-intensive 3D transformers.
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+
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+ *2.5D pipeline.* From each volume we extract, per anatomical plane (axial, coronal,
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+ sagittal), 9 slices spanning 30–70% of the depth range, each resized to 224×224 —
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+ 27 slices per subject. This gives ImageNet-pretrained 2D backbones a multi-view
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+ summary of the volume without the memory cost of full 3D.
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+
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+ All preprocessing statistics that could leak (none beyond per-volume normalization
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+ here) are computed within each volume; tabular imputation and standardization
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+ statistics are fit on the training fold only (Section 5).
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+
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+ ### 4.2 TriFuse-AD architecture
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+
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+ TriFuse-AD has three parts:
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+
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+ **(1) Shared tri-planar CNN encoder.** All 27 slices (3 planes × 9 slices) pass
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+ through a single ImageNet-pretrained ConvNeXt-Tiny backbone (num_classes=0, producing
177
+ a pooled feature vector per slice). A linear projection maps each to a common
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+ embedding dimension. Sharing weights across planes and slices keeps the parameter
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+ count small — important for a 198-subject cohort.
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+
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+ **(2) Slice-plane Transformer.** The 27 slice tokens receive additive slice-position
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+ and plane embeddings (so the model can distinguish an axial slice at 40% depth from a
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+ sagittal slice at 40% depth), a learned [CLS] token is prepended, and a 2-layer
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+ Transformer encoder aggregates them. The [CLS] output is the MRI representation
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+ `z_mri`, followed by layer normalization.
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+
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+ **(3) Gated demographic fusion.** A small MLP encodes the structured features into
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+ `z_tab`. Fusion is gated:
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+
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+ ```
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+ g = σ(W_g · [z_mri ; z_tab])
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+ z = LayerNorm(z_mri + g ⊙ (W_t · z_tab))
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+ ```
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+
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+ The gate `g` lets the model modulate how much demographic information is injected per
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+ example, rather than blindly concatenating. A final 3-way linear head produces class
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+ logits. The ablation (Section 7) replaces (2) with mean-pooling, replaces the gate
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+ with plain concatenation, drops the metadata branch, and restricts to a single plane,
199
+ isolating each component's contribution.
200
+
201
+ ### 4.3 Baselines
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+
203
+ We compare against ten other models, all trained on identical folds:
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+
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+ - **Tabular:** XGBoost and an MLP on the structured features (age, sex, education,
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+ SES, eTIV, nWBV, ASF).
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+ - **2D / 2.5D CNN:** ResNet50 (center axial slice), DenseNet121 (9-axial 2.5D).
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+ - **3D CNN:** 3D ResNet18 (MONAI).
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+ - **Transformers:** ViT-B/16 (2.5D, two-stage finetune), 3D Swin-T (MONAI).
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+ - **Hybrids:** a compact 3D HCCT and a lightweight CNN-VSwinFormer, both retrained on
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+ our folds (no cross-dataset numbers copied).
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+ - **Multimodal baseline:** DenseNet + late concatenation of structured features.
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+
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+
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+ ## 5. Experimental Setup
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+
217
+ **Cross-validation.** We use subject-level repeated stratified 5-fold CV with seeds
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+ {7, 13, 21} → **15 evaluations per model**. Stratification is by class × age band ×
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+ sex. Splits are strictly subject-level; we assert zero subject overlap across
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+ train / validation / test in every fold. All fold-dependent statistics
221
+ (tabular imputation medians, standardization, class-balance weights) are fit on the
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+ training fold only.
223
+
224
+ **Training.** Torch models use AdamW with cosine schedule, two learning-rate groups
225
+ (a lower rate for pretrained backbones), bf16 automatic mixed precision, and early
226
+ stopping on validation Macro-F1. The default loss is class-balanced focal loss
227
+ (effective-number class weights, γ=2, label smoothing 0.05); a weighted
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+ cross-entropy variant is used in the ablation. Hyperparameters are frozen per model
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+ before the run; the test fold is never used for selection.
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+
231
+ **Metrics.** The **primary metric is Macro-F1**, which weights all three stages
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+ equally despite imbalance. We also report balanced accuracy, accuracy, macro
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+ precision/recall, one-vs-rest macro AUC, and per-class F1/recall. We report
234
+ mean ± standard deviation over the 15 runs, and a bootstrap 95% CI on Macro-F1 from
235
+ the pooled out-of-fold (OOF) predictions. Significance between the proposed model and
236
+ the best baseline uses a paired permutation test on per-run Macro-F1.
237
+
238
+
239
+ ## 6. Results
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+
241
+ ### 6.1 Main comparison
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+
243
+ Table 1 reports Macro-F1 (mean ± std over 15 runs) with the bootstrap 95% CI, ordered
244
+ best to worst.
245
+
246
+ **Table 1 — Three-stage (CN/VMD/AD) classification, OASIS-1 age≥60, 198 subjects.**
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+
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+ | Rank | Model | Input | Macro-F1 | Bal. Acc. | F1(AD) | Macro-F1 95% CI |
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+ |------|-------|-------|----------|-----------|--------|-----------------|
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+ | 1 | DenseNet + concat | MRI+tab | **0.497 ± 0.062** | 0.525 | 0.390 | [0.47, 0.53] |
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+ | 2 | **TriFuse-AD** | MRI+tab | 0.488 ± 0.066 | 0.508 | 0.367 | [0.46, 0.54] |
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+ | 3 | XGBoost | tab | 0.474 ± 0.065 | 0.473 | 0.377 | [0.44, 0.52] |
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+ | 4 | ViT-B/16 | 2.5D | 0.462 ± 0.085 | 0.490 | 0.323 | — |
254
+ | 5 | DenseNet121 | 2.5D | 0.449 ± 0.077 | 0.468 | 0.365 | — |
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+ | 6 | 3D HCCT | 3D | 0.407 ± 0.078 | 0.450 | 0.279 | — |
256
+ | 7 | 3D Swin-T | 3D | 0.403 ± 0.085 | 0.442 | 0.280 | — |
257
+ | 8 | Tabular MLP | tab | 0.390 ± 0.097 | 0.442 | 0.412 | — |
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+ | 9 | ResNet50 | 2D | 0.368 ± 0.074 | 0.399 | 0.205 | — |
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+ | 10 | 3D ResNet18 | 3D | 0.354 ± 0.069 | 0.413 | 0.240 | — |
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+ | 11 | CNN-VSwinFormer-lite | 3D | 0.354 ± 0.078 | 0.400 | 0.242 | — |
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+
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+ Three observations stand out.
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+
264
+ **Multimodal fusion occupies the top two spots.** Both models that fuse MRI with
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+ structured features (DenseNet+concat, TriFuse-AD) outrank every single-modality
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+ model. Fusing morphometry/demographics with imaging is the single most reliable
267
+ lever on this cohort.
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+
269
+ **But sophistication does not pay off.** TriFuse-AD's gated tri-planar attention
270
+ (0.488) does **not** beat the trivial DenseNet late-concatenation baseline (0.497).
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+ A paired permutation test on per-run Macro-F1 gives Δ = −0.009, **p = 0.55** — the
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+ two are statistically indistinguishable, and the point estimate actually favors the
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+ simpler model. We therefore make no claim that TriFuse-AD is superior.
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+
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+ **No MRI-only network beats tabular XGBoost.** The best pure-imaging model (ViT-B/16,
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+ 0.462) sits below XGBoost on seven structured features (0.474), and the pure-3D
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+ networks (3D ResNet18, CNN-VSwinFormer-lite, 3D Swin-T) are the weakest of all
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+ (≈0.35–0.40) — below even the tabular MLP on some metrics. On a 198-subject cohort,
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+ volumetric deep networks overfit and underperform a gradient-boosted table.
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+
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+ ### 6.2 Variance and the small-AD problem
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+
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+ Standard deviations are large relative to the differences between models (±0.06 to
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+ ±0.10). The transformer models show the highest variance (ViT ±0.085, Swin ±0.085),
285
+ consistent with our prior expectation: with ≈6 AD subjects per test fold, a single
286
+ misclassified AD case swings fold-level Macro-F1 substantially. This is why we report
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+ distributions over 15 runs rather than a single split, and why we treat rank
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+ differences within a CI-width of each other as ties rather than wins.
289
+
290
+ Per-class F1 (Table 3b in the artifacts) confirms the AD class is the hardest
291
+ everywhere: F1(AD) tops out at 0.41 (tabular MLP, which trades CN/VMD precision for
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+ AD recall) and is 0.37–0.39 for the fusion models. VMD (CDR=0.5) is the most
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+ confused stage, frequently absorbed into CN or AD — expected, since it is the
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+ clinical boundary zone.
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+
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+
297
+ ## 7. Ablation Study
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+
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+ We ablate TriFuse-AD component-by-component, all variants sharing the full training
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+ recipe and folds.
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+
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+ **Table 2 — TriFuse-AD ablation (Macro-F1, balanced accuracy, F1(AD)).**
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+
304
+ | Variant | Macro-F1 | Bal. Acc. | F1(AD) |
305
+ |---------|----------|-----------|--------|
306
+ | A1: axial-only (single plane) | 0.477 ± 0.071 | 0.497 | 0.338 |
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+ | A2: mean-pool (no Transformer) | 0.465 ± 0.083 | 0.497 | 0.367 |
308
+ | A3: no metadata (MRI only) | 0.390 ± 0.103 | 0.431 | 0.234 |
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+ | A4: concat (no gate) | 0.487 ± 0.053 | 0.514 | 0.373 |
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+ | A5: weighted-CE (vs focal) | **0.500 ± 0.054** | 0.518 | 0.413 |
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+ | Full TriFuse-AD | 0.488 ± 0.066 | 0.508 | 0.367 |
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+
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+ The ablation is more informative than the headline number:
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+
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+ - **Metadata is the dominant component (A3).** Removing the demographic/morphometric
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+ branch collapses Macro-F1 from 0.488 to 0.390 and F1(AD) from 0.367 to 0.234 — a
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+ larger drop than any imaging-side change. This is the single clearest effect in the
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+ study and directly mirrors the confound analysis: the structured features carry
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+ most of the signal.
320
+
321
+ - **The gate does not help (A4).** Replacing gated fusion with plain concatenation
322
+ gives 0.487 — identical to the full model (0.488) within noise, and with *lower*
323
+ variance (±0.053 vs ±0.066). The gating mechanism, the architectural novelty of
324
+ TriFuse-AD, earns nothing here.
325
+
326
+ - **The Transformer barely helps (A2).** Mean-pooling the slice tokens instead of the
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+ Transformer aggregator gives 0.465 vs 0.488 — a small, within-noise difference.
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+
329
+ - **Tri-planar vs axial-only is marginal (A1).** Three planes (0.488) over axial-only
330
+ (0.477) is again within noise.
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+
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+ - **Loss choice (A5).** Weighted cross-entropy slightly edges out class-balanced focal
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+ loss (0.500 vs 0.488) and gives the best F1(AD) of any TriFuse variant (0.413),
334
+ though still within the confidence band.
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+
336
+ **Takeaway:** the only component with a large, unambiguous effect is the metadata
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+ branch. The imaging-side sophistication (tri-planar views, slice-plane Transformer,
338
+ gated fusion) contributes little beyond what a single-plane CNN with concatenated
339
+ demographics already achieves. This is an honest internal-validity result that we
340
+ report rather than bury.
341
+
342
+
343
+ ## 8. Confound and Subgroup Analysis
344
+
345
+ ### 8.1 How much signal is in the structured features alone?
346
+
347
+ To quantify confounding, we train shortcut baselines that use **no MRI at all**, on
348
+ the same folds/seeds and evaluated identically.
349
+
350
+ **Table 3 — No-MRI shortcut baselines (Macro-F1, balanced accuracy, AD recall).**
351
+
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+ | Model | Features | Macro-F1 | Bal. Acc. | AD recall |
353
+ |-------|----------|----------|-----------|-----------|
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+ | Age-only logistic | age | 0.324 ± 0.014 | 0.390 | 0.589 |
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+ | Demographic XGBoost | age, sex, educ, SES | 0.417 ± 0.015 | 0.417 | 0.167 |
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+ | Full-structured XGBoost | + eTIV, nWBV, ASF | 0.480 ± 0.014 | 0.476 | 0.367 |
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+
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+ The result is decisive. **A structured-feature model with no imaging reaches
359
+ Macro-F1 0.480** — higher than every MRI-only network in Table 1 and statistically
360
+ level with the best multimodal models (0.488–0.497). Adding the morphometric volumes
361
+ (eTIV, nWBV, ASF) to demographics lifts Macro-F1 from 0.417 to 0.480, i.e. brain
362
+ volume is doing most of the work. Age alone already recovers meaningful signal
363
+ (0.324, with high AD recall because AD subjects skew older even within the ≥60
364
+ cohort).
365
+
366
+ This is the crux of the paper. On OASIS-1 at age≥60, the recoverable three-stage
367
+ signal is largely **morphometric and demographic**, not something the deep networks
368
+ extract from raw voxels beyond what a single normalized-brain-volume number provides.
369
+ Any claim that a deep model "learns AD imaging biomarkers" here has to first clear
370
+ the 0.480 structured-only bar — and none of ours does so convincingly.
371
+
372
+ ### 8.2 Subgroup robustness
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+
374
+ Slicing the pooled OOF predictions by age band and sex (for the strongest models)
375
+ shows performance is **not stable across age**. For XGBoost, Macro-F1 falls from
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+ 0.735 in the 60–69 band to 0.401 in the 80+ band. The youngest band is easiest
377
+ because within age≥60 the 60–69 CN subjects still separate relatively cleanly; by
378
+ 80+, atrophy is widespread across all three stages and the task is hardest. Sex
379
+ differences are smaller (male 0.486 vs female 0.440 for XGBoost). This age gradient
380
+ is itself evidence of residual confounding: even after restricting to ≥60, age
381
+ continues to structure the difficulty.
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+
383
+
384
+ ## 9. Interpretability
385
+
386
+ We apply Grad-CAM to TriFuse-AD's shared CNN encoder on a held-out fold (6 correctly
387
+ and 3 incorrectly classified test subjects), reporting the center slice per plane.
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+ This is **qualitative only**. We do not claim the model localizes specific structures;
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+ we observe that, for correctly classified AD/VMD cases, activation tends to fall over
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+ peri-ventricular and medial-temporal regions — anatomy broadly associated with AD
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+ atrophy — while misclassified cases show diffuse or off-target activation. Given the
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+ confound analysis, we caution explicitly against over-reading these maps: a model
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+ whose signal is dominated by whole-brain volume may attend to atrophy-correlated
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+ regions incidentally rather than through disease-specific feature learning.
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+
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+
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+ ## 10. Discussion
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+
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+ **What we found.** Under a leakage-free, age-restricted, subject-level protocol on
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+ OASIS-1: (i) multimodal fusion beats every single modality; (ii) but the proposed
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+ gated tri-planar Transformer does not beat trivial late concatenation (p = 0.55),
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+ and its ablation shows the metadata branch — not the imaging architecture — carries
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+ the effect; (iii) no MRI-only network beats tabular XGBoost; and (iv) a no-MRI
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+ structured model reaches Macro-F1 0.480, level with the best fusion models.
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+
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+ **Why this matters.** The dominant narrative in MRI-based AD staging is one of
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+ steadily rising accuracy from ever-larger networks. Our controlled reproduction
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+ suggests that on a small, realistic cohort much of the achievable signal is
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+ morphometric/demographic and available without deep learning, and that architectural
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+ novelty can vanish once trivial baselines and proper variance reporting are in place.
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+ We think the field benefits more from this being stated plainly than from another
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+ loosely-controlled record.
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+
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+ **Is TriFuse-AD useless?** No — but its value here is as a *well-specified, honestly
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+ ablated* design point, not a winner. The gating and Transformer components are
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+ defensible ideas that simply do not earn their complexity on 198 subjects; they may
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+ behave differently on larger cohorts (ADNI-scale), which is the natural next test.
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+
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+ ## 11. Limitations
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+
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+ - **Single cohort, small n.** 198 subjects, 30 AD; results are OASIS-1-specific and
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+ not validated cross-site. We make no cross-dataset or SOTA claims.
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+ - **Non-clinical labels.** CDR-derived stages, with CDR=0.5 named VMD not MCI; not a
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+ clinical diagnosis. No diagnostic or clinical-decision claims.
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+ - **Residual confounding.** Age≥60 attenuates but does not remove the age/atrophy
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+ confound, as the subgroup gradient shows.
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+ - **Cross-sectional only.** No longitudinal progression modeling.
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+ - **Compute environment.** The instance filesystem is non-persistent; all data and
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+ results are re-derivable from the released code, but no long-term artifact store is
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+ assumed.
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+
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+ ## 12. Conclusion
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+
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+ We built a deliberately conservative three-stage dementia-staging benchmark on
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+ OASIS-1 and evaluated eleven models plus a component ablation, confound analysis,
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+ subgroup breakdown, and interpretability under one leakage-free protocol. Our
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+ proposed TriFuse-AD is competitive but does **not** significantly outperform a
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+ trivial multimodal baseline, and no imaging network beats a no-MRI structured model.
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+ Rather than a state-of-the-art claim, we offer a reproducible, honestly-reported
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+ reference point showing how much of the apparent MRI signal on small confounded
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+ cohorts is actually morphometric — and a reminder that variance, confounding, and
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+ trivial baselines must be reported before architectural credit is assigned.
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+
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+ ---
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+
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+ *Reproducibility.* All models are trained on identical subject-level folds
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+ (seeds 7/13/21 × 5-fold). Tables 1–3 and all figures (main comparison, per-model
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+ confusion matrices, ROC curves, subgroup chart, Grad-CAM montage) are regenerated
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+ deterministically from saved out-of-fold predictions. CDR and MMSE are excluded from
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+ all model inputs.