Abstract
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been introduced to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) diagnosis. Despite their encouraging prospects, most of the existing models only process AD-related brain atrophy on a single spatial scale, and have high computational complexity. Here, we propose a novel Attention-based 3D Multi-scale CNN model (AMSNet), which can better capture and integrate multiple spatial-scale features of AD, with a concise structure. For the binary classification between 384 AD patients and 389 Cognitively Normal (CN) controls using sMRI scannings, AMSNet achieves remarkable overall performance (91.3% accuracy, 88.3% sensitivity, and 94.2% specificity) with fewer parameters and lower computational load, generally surpassing seven comparative models. Furthermore, AMSNet generalizes well in other AD-related classification tasks, such as the three-way classification (AD-MCI-CN). Our results manifest the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed multi-scale spatial feature integration and attention mechanism used in AMSNet for AD classification, and provide potential biomarkers to explore the neuropathological causes of AD.
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