An efficient 3D deep convolutional network for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis using MR images

Abstract

Automatic extraction of features from MRI brain scans and diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) remain a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an efficient and simple three-dimensional convolutional network (3D ConvNet) architecture that is able to achieve high performance for detection of AD on a relatively large dataset. The proposed 3D ConvNet consists of five convolutional layers for feature extraction, followed by three fully-connected layers for AD/NC classification. The main contributions of the paper include: (a) propose a novel and effective 3D ConvNet architecture; (b) study the impact of hyper-parameter selection on the performance of AD classification; (c) study the impact of pre-processing; (d) study the impact of data partitioning; (e) study the impact of dataset size. Experiments conducted on an ADNI dataset containing 340 subjects and 1198 MRI brain scans have resulted good performance (with the test accuracy of 98.74%, 100% AD detection rate and 2,4% false alarm). Comparisons with 7 existing state-of-the-art methods have provided strong support to the robustness of the proposed method.