Convolutional variational auto-encoder and vision transformer hybrid approach for enhanced early Alzheimer's detection.

Purpose: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is becoming more prevalent among the elderly, with projections indicating that it will affect a significantly large population in the future. Regardless of substantial research efforts and investments focused on exploring the underlying biological factors, a definitive cure has yet to be discovered. The currently available treatments are only effective in slowing disease progression if it is identified in the early stages of the disease. Therefore, early diagnosis has become critical in treating AD.

Approach: Recently, the use of deep learning techniques has demonstrated remarkable improvement in enhancing the precision and speed of automatic AD diagnosis through medical image analysis. We propose a hybrid model that integrates a convolutional variational auto-encoder (CVAE) with a vision transformer (ViT). During the encoding phase, the CVAE captures key features from the MRI scans, whereas the decoding phase reduces irrelevant details in MRIs. These refined inputs enhance the ViT's ability to analyze complex patterns through its multihead attention mechanism.

Results: The model was trained and evaluated using 14,000 structural MRI samples from the ADNI and SCAN databases. Compared with three benchmark methods and previous studies with Alzheimer's classification techniques, our approach achieved a significant improvement, with a test accuracy of 93.3%.

Conclusions: Through this research, we identified the potential of the CVAE-ViT hybrid approach in detecting minor structural abnormalities related to AD. Integrating unsupervised feature extraction via CVAE can significantly enhance transformer-based models in distinguishing between stages of cognitive impairment, thereby identifying early indicators of AD.