Deep Learning-Based Magnetic Resonance Image Segmentation and Classification for Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

Abstract

Accurate and rapid detection of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) gained considerable attention among research workers because of an increased number of current researches being driven by deep learning (DL) methods that have accomplished outstanding outcomes in variety of domains involving medical image analysis. Especially, convolution neural network (CNN) is primarily applied for the analyses of image datasets according to the capability of handling massive unstructured datasets and automatically extracting significant features. Earlier detection is dominant to the success and development interferences, and neuroimaging characterizes the potential regions for earlier diagnosis of AD. The study presents and develops a novel Deep Learning-based Magnetic Resonance Image Segmentation and Classification for AD Diagnosis (DLMRISC-ADD) model. The presented DLMRISC-ADD model mainly focuses on the segmentation of MRI images to detect AD. To accomplish this, the presented DLMRISC-ADD model follows a two-stage process, namely, skull stripping and image segmentation. At the preliminary stage, the presented DLMRISC-ADD model employs U-Net-based skull stripping approach to remove skull regions from the input MRIs. Next, in the second stage, the DLMRISC-ADD model applies QuickNAT model for MRI image segmentation, which identifies distinct parts such as white matter, gray matter, hippocampus, amygdala, and ventricles. Moreover, densely connected network (DenseNet201) feature extractor with sparse autoencoder (SAE) classifier is used for AD detection process. A brief set of simulations is implemented on ADNI dataset to demonstrate the improved performance of the DLMRISC-ADD method, and the outcomes are examined extensively. The experimental results exhibit the effectual segmentation results of the DLMRISC-ADD technique.