Early detection of Alzheimer's disease in structural and functional MRI.

Abstract

Objectives: To implement state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as Deep-Residual-U-Net and DeepLabV3+ for precise segmentation of hippocampus and ventricles, in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Integrate VGG-16 with Random Forest (VGG-16-RF) and VGG-16 with Support Vector Machine (VGG-16-SVM) to enhance the binary classification accuracy of Alzheimer's disease, comparing their performance against traditional classifiers.

Method: OpenNeuro and Harvard's Data verse provides Alzheimer's coronal functional MRI data. Ventricles and hippocampus are segmented using a Deep-Residual-UNet and Deep labV3+ system. The functional features were extracted from each segmented component and classified using SVM, Adaboost, Logistic regression, and VGG 16, DenseNet-169, VGG-16-RF, and VGG-16-SVM classifier.

Results: This research proposes a precise and efficient deep-learning architecture like DeepLab V3+ and Deep Residual U-NET for hippocampus and ventricle segmentation in detection of AD. DeepLab V3+ has produced a good segmentation accuracy of 94.62% with Jaccard co-efficient of 85.5% and dice co-efficient of 84.75%. Among the three ML classifiers used, SVM has provided a good accuracy of 93%. Among some DL techniques, VGG-16-RF classifier has given better accuracy of 96.87%.

Conclusion: The novelty of this work lies in the seamless integration of advanced segmentation techniques with hybrid classifiers, offering a robust and scalable framework for early AD detection. The proposed study demonstrates a significant advancement in the early detection of Alzheimer's disease by integrating state-of-the-art deep learning models and comprehensive functional connectivity analysis. This early detection capability is crucial for timely intervention and better management of the disease in neurodegenerative disorder diagnostics.