Alzheimer’s disease (AD) constitutes a fatal neurodegenerative disorder and represents the most prevalent form of dementia among the elderly population. Traditional manual AD classification methods, such as clinical diagnosis, are known to be time-consuming and labor-intensive, with relatively low accuracy. Therefore, our work aims to develop a new deep learning framework to tackle this challenge. Our proposed model integrates ConvNeXt with three-dimensional (3D) convolution and incorporates a 3D Squeeze-and-Excitation (3D-SE) attention mechanism to enhance early classification of AD. The experimental data is sourced from the publicly accessible Alzheimer’s disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database, with raw Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data preprocessed using SPM12 software. Subsequently, the preprocessed data is input into the 3D-SEConvNeXt network to perform four classification tasks: distinguishing between AD and Normal Control (NC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and NC, AD and MCI, as well as AD, MCI, and NC. The experimental results indicate that the 3D-SEConvNeXt model consistently outperforms alternative models in terms of accuracy, achieving commendable outcomes in early AD diagnostic tasks.
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