AccScience Publishing / AN / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AN026230024
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Spectral-conditioned hypernetworks for meta-learning neuroimaging normalization with concept-guided transparency

Hashim Ali*
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1 School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Advanced Neurology, 026230024 https://doi.org/10.36922/AN026230024
Received: 6 June 2026 | Revised: 13 July 2026 | Accepted: 16 July 2026 | Published online: 4 August 2026
© 2026 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Multi-site neuroimaging studies are essential for developing clinically deployable artificial intelligence (AI) systems, yet deep learning models remain highly sensitive to scanner-induced domain shift. Variations in scanner manufacturer, field strength, acquisition protocol, reconstruction pipeline, and site-specific preprocessing can alter image intensity, texture, and spatial-frequency characteristics, thus degrading model performance when deployed on unseen scanners. This paper presents a spectral-conditioned hypernetwork framework for meta-learning neuroimaging normalization with concept-guided transparency. The proposed framework integrates a spectral-conditioned hypernetwork into the batch normalization layers of a three-dimensional convolutional encoder. For each input magnetic resonance imaging volume, a compact spectral embedding is extracted from the three-dimensional Fourier magnitude spectrum and used to dynamically generate the channel-wise normalization scale and shift parameters. This enables input-adaptive normalization without requiring explicit site labels or scanner metadata. To improve generalization to unseen imaging centers, this study formulates a bi-level meta-learning protocol in which small site-specific support sets adapt only the hypernetwork parameters, while the outer loop jointly optimizes the encoder and hypernetwork across multiple source sites. To enhance clinical interpretability, the proposed framework introduces a concept-guided regularization term that aligns gradient-weighted class activation mapping attribution maps with predefined anatomical regions of interest, including the hippocampus, ventricles, temporal pole, and entorhinal cortex. The framework is evaluated on a multi-site Alzheimer’s disease classification benchmark using leave-one-site-out validation. The proposed method improves diagnostic performance, reduces cross-site variability in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, and produces stronger alignment of attribution with clinically meaningful anatomical concepts compared to statistical harmonization, adversarial domain adaptation, meta-learning domain generalization, site-conditioned normalization, and concept-based interpretability baselines. These findings suggest that coupling adaptive normalization with few-shot meta-learning and anatomical concept guidance provides a practical pathway toward robust and transparent AI-assisted neuroimaging diagnosis.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Neuroimaging
Magnetic resonance imaging
Domain generalization
Hypernetwork
Meta-learning
Explainable artificial intelligence
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that there are no competing interests.
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Advanced Neurology, Electronic ISSN: 2810-9619 Print ISSN: 3060-8589, Published by AccScience Publishing