Classification of Alzheimer’s Disease Based on Deep Learning Using Medical Images

Abstract

Neurodegenerative disorders, notably Alzheimer’s, pose an escalating global health challenge. Marked by the degeneration of brain neurons, these conditions lead to a gradual decline in nerve cells. Worldwide, over 55 million people grapple with dementia, with Alzheimer’s prominently impacting the aging demographic. The primary hurdle to early Alzheimer’s detection is the widespread lack of awareness. The main goal is to design and implement an artificial intelligence system using deep learning (DL) to detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) through medical images and classify them into various stages, such as non-demented, moderate dementia, mild dementia, and very mild dementia. The dataset contains 6400 magnetic resonance images in .jpg format, with standardized dimensions of 176 × 208 pixels. To demonstrate the advantages of data augmentation and transformation techniques, four scenarios were created: two without these techniques, utilizing the Adam and SGD optimizers, and two with these techniques, also employing the Adam and SGD optimizers, respectively. The main results revealed that scenarios utilizing these techniques exhibited more stable performance when validated with a new dataset. Scenario 3, using the Adam optimizer, achieved a weighted average accuracy of 91.83%, whereas scenario 4, employing the SGD optimizer, reached 87.58% accuracy. In contrast, scenarios 1 and 2, which omitted these techniques, obtained low accuracies below 55%. It is concluded that classifying AD with a DL model exceeding 90% accuracy is feasible. This is the importance of utilizing data augmentation and transformation techniques to improve generalizability to input image variations, which is a consistent factor in the healthcare sector.