Automatic Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease Using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract

Neuroimaging data analysis has attracted a great deal of attention with respect to the accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners have thus been commonly used to study AD-related brain structural variations, providing images that demonstrate both morphometric and anatomical changes in the human brain. Deep learning algorithms have already been effectively exploited in other medical image processing applications to identify features and recognise patterns for many diseases that affect the brain and other organs; this paper extends on this to describe a novel computer aided software pipeline for the classification and early diagnosis of AD. The proposed method uses two types of three-dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNN) to facilitate brain MRI data analysis and automatic feature extraction and classification, so that pre-processing and post-processing are utilised to normalise the MRI data and facilitate pattern recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves 97.5%, 82.5%, and 83.75% accuracy in terms of binary classification AD vs. cognitively normal (CN), CN vs. mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and MCI vs. AD, respectively, as well as 85% accuracy for multi class-classification, based on publicly available data sets from the Alzheimer’s disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).