CrossViT Wide Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation Network for Alzheimer's disease classification with self attention ProGAN data augmentation

Efficient and accurate early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on the neuroimaging data has attracted interest from many researchers to prevent its progression. Deep learning networks have demonstrated an optimal ability to analyse large-scale multimodal neuroimaging for AD classification. The most widely used architecture of deep learning is the Convolution neural networks (CNN) that have shown great potential in AD detection. However CNN does not capture long range dependencies within the input image and does not ensure a good global feature extraction. Furthermore, increasing the receptive field of CNN by increasing the kernels sizes can cause a feature granularity loss. Another limitation is that CNN lacks a weighing mechanism of image features; the network doesn’t focus on the relevant features within the image. Recently,vision transformer have shown an outstanding performance over the CNN and overcomes its main limitations. The vision transformer relies on the self-attention layers. The main drawbacks of this new technique is that it requires a huge amount of training data. In this paper, we combined the main strengths of these two architectures for AD classification. We proposed a new method based on the combination of the Cross ViT and Wide Residual Squeeze-and-Excitation Network. We acquired MRI data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS). We also proposed a new data augmentation based on the self attention progressive generative adversarial neural network to overcome the limitation of the data. Our proposed method achieved 99% classification accuracy and outperforms CNN models.