NeuroBridge: Bridging Multi-Task MRI Knowledge for Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis

Mengyu Li, Guoyao Shen, Chad W. Farris, Xin Zhang

INTRODUCTION: Accurate MRI-based identification of Alzheimer's disease (AD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and related dementias remains challenging because disease-related structural changes are often subtle and heterogeneous. We developed NeuroBridge, a clinically guided multi-task MRI framework for neurodegenerative disease diagnosis. METHODS: NeuroBridge integrates large-scale self-supervised MRI pretraining with hippocampal segmentation, hippocampal atrophy classification, and reconstruction objectives, followed by gated fusion fine-tuning. Performance was evaluated across ADNI and OASIS cohorts, including cross-cohort transfer, probability-based analysis, and opportunistic screening. RESULTS: NeuroBridge achieved the highest performance across evaluated classification tasks, reaching 88.17% accuracy for AD versus cognitively normal controls in ADNI and 82.78% in OASIS. The largest gains occurred in MCI-related and mixed-diagnosis settings. The framework demonstrated strong cross-cohort generalization, systematic associations between predicted-class probability and accuracy, and the feasibility of probability-based opportunistic screening. DISCUSSION: Clinically guided multi-task representation learning improves neurodegenerative MRI diagnosis beyond conventional single-task approaches. NeuroBridge provides a robust and scalable framework for dementia assessment and MRI-based opportunistic screening.