6. Discussion
The results show that multimodal FNC and SBM information can be combined within an attention based
multiscale framework. MsRNN produced the highest point estimate of accuracy in the reported held-out
comparison (83.33%), with precision of 85.71%, recall of 75.00%, and F1-score of 80.00%. The model also
produced a more balanced precisionrecall profile than several baselines. However, the practical difference
between point estimates must be interpreted together with the uncertainty analysis. The 95% confidence
intervals are wide and overlap because the held-out set contains only 18 subjects. The revised paper therefore
treats the performance result as preliminary rather than as proof that MsRNN is statistically better than every
benchmark.
The small cohort is the main limitation. With 86 subjects and hundreds of features, overfitting is a substantial
risk. To reduce leakage, scaling and ANOVA feature selection are defined as training-only operations in the
revised methodology. Even with this safeguard, a single held-out split can be sensitive to which subjects enter
the test set. A larger independent dataset, repeated stratified cross-validation, or nested cross-validation would
provide a stronger estimate of generalization. Because the archived submission package did not include
executable training code or subject-level prediction files, this revision does not invent repeated-run results or
pairwise significance tests that cannot be reconstructed reliably.
Feature ranking and t-SNE provide complementary information. The high-ranked feature list contains a strong
SBM contribution, while the t-SNE plot shows overlap between the two diagnostic groups. These findings
suggest that structural features contribute useful discrimination in this fitted model, but the two groups remain
heterogeneous. The ICA maps give anatomical context to the feature analysis, yet they should be interpreted at
the group/model level.
LRP and Grad-CAM make the model easier to inspect, but post-hoc explanations have their own uncertainty. A
highlighted area indicates that a fitted model used information from that area; it does not prove that the region
is a clinically validated biomarker or a causal mechanism. The present figures provide qualitative examples only.
A stronger XAI validation would calculate explanation consistency across sub-jects and repeated models, for
example by measuring overlap or rank correlation of salient regions and then testing the same regions in an
independent cohort. These steps are important before clinical use.
avoided unless referring to prior validated literature. The displayed regions are described as candidate or
discriminative regions that require external validation. This distinction is especially important because the
present cohort is small and comes from a single challenge dataset.
Finally, reproducibility is limited by missing software-level details in the archived manuscript package. The
revised paper reports all settings that can be recovered reliably, including the number of modalities and
features, selected-feature count, three multiscale branches, filter counts, feature-map size, attention fusion,
binary loss, and held-out sample size. The optimizer, learning rate, batch size, kernel size, software versions,
and random seed should be recovered from the original executable code before final publication if those records
are available.
6. Conclusion
This paper presents a multimodal MRI classification framework that combines fMRI-derived FNC features and
sMRI-derived SBM features with multiscale feature extraction, attention fusion, and XAI. On the 18-subject held-
out test set, MsRNN achieved 83.33% accuracy, 85.71% precision, 75.00% recall, and 80.00% F1-score. The
95% Wilson interval for accuracy (60.7894.16%) shows that the estimate remains uncertain because of the
small sample. LRP and Grad-CAM provide useful model-level visual explanations, but the highlighted regions
require independent validation before they can be interpreted as clinical biomarkers. Future work should use
larger indepen-dent cohorts, repeated or nested validation, quantitative XAI-stability measures, and complete
release of implementation settings and subject-level predictions.
CRediT Author Contribution Statement
Mohammad Shohelur Rahman:
Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis,
Visualization, WritingOriginal draft, WritingReview and editing.
Ahnaf Tajwar:
Conceptualization,
Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Visualization, WritingOriginal draft, WritingReview and
editing.
Tawaz Rahman:
Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Visualization,
WritingOriginal draft, WritingReview and editing. All authors reviewed and approved the final
manuscript and agree to be accountable for the work.
Data Availability Statement