NeuroAlign: Hierarchical multimodal fusion of dynamic and structural neuroimaging for MCI analysis

Multimodal neuroimaging fusion of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provides complementary information for cognitive impairment analysis, but remains challenged by heterogeneous feature spaces and misaligned representations. We propose NeuroAlign , a hierarchical framework for structured multimodal fusion. It introduces (1) Dual-Modal Hierarchical Alignment (DMHA), which models multi-scale dynamic connectivity and aligns dynamic–static and functional–structural embeddings; and (2) Dual-Domain Hierarchical Interaction (DDHI), which enables fine-grained modulation and global interaction between connectivity- and region-level features. To support feature-level inspection, we design Synergistic Activation Mapping (SAM), a gradient-free, marker-oriented attribution method for DFC, SFC, ALFF, and FA. Evaluated on GUTCM, ADNI, and OASIS under five-fold validation, NeuroAlign achieves competitive MCI/SCD detection and preliminary cross-dataset transferability. Attribution analyses reveal modality-specific and partially consistent brain patterns, providing model-derived evidence for multimodal representation analysis.