Title:Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease Based on Deeply-Fused Nets
Volume: 24
Issue: 6
Author(s): Chang Zu Chen, Qi Wu, Zuo Yong Li , Lei Xiao and Zhong Yi Hu*
Affiliation:
- Intelligent Information Systems Institute, Department of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou 325035,China
Keywords:
Deep convolutional network, Alzheimer's disease, fused net, single standard base network, diagnosis, accuracy of
automatic diagnosis.
Abstract:
Aim and Objective: Fast and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is very important
for the care and further treatment of patients. Along with the development of deep learning, impressive
progress has also been made in the automatic diagnosis of AD. Most existing studies on automatic
diagnosis are concerned with a single base network, whose accuracy for disease diagnosis
still needs to be improved. This study was undertaken to propose a method to improve the accuracy
of the automatic diagnosis of AD.
Materials and Methods: MRI image data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
were used to train a deep learning model to achieve a computer-aided diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
The data consisted of 138 with AD, 280 with mild cognitive impairment, and 138 normal controls.
Here, a new deeply-fused net is proposed, which combines several deep convolutional neural
networks, thereby avoiding the error of a single base network and increasing the classification accuracy
and generalization capacity.
Results: Experiments show that when differentiating between patients with AD, mild cognitive impairment,
and normal controls on a subset of the ADNI database without data leakage, the new architecture
improves the accuracy by about 4 percentage points as compared to a single standard
based network.
Conclusion: This new approach exhibits better performance, but there is still much to be done before
its clinical application. In the future, greater research effort will be devoted to improving the
performance of the deeply-fused net.
